I read That Hideous Strength in college for a class on the Arthurian tradition. Twenty-five years later, I still remember the paper I wroute contrasting the men trying to create a god by separating a man from his body, and the example of the Christan God taking up the burden of a body in order to fulfill his role as a deity. (Hey, it's a C. S. Lewis story.)
I went back and read the other boods subsequently. I thought they worked better as allegory than as sci-fi, but were interesting enough.
Imagine a man and a woman retiring to his apartment for an intimate evening. As they enter the door, a beep sounds, and he goes to a keypad to turn off the alarm siren before it wakes the building. He tells her, "Yeah, I got a security system last year after a break in. It's got all the bells and whistles. Let me put in "At home" mode.
After a mutually gratifying, consensual evening, she goes home.
The next day she discovers videos of their evening on the internet.
When she confronts him, he replies, "Hey, the cameras are part of my security system. I told you it had all the bells and whistles and that I was putting it in "at home" mode. That means the cameras go on to identify anybody who comes in to attack me. The footage is my property. You didin't object to it last night, and since the recording has commercial value, I decided to sell it. You consented by not objecting before we started. It's too late now to complain, the video exists. I might as well make money off of it."
I don't think it's unreasonable of her to assume that the video could not legally be published without her explicit, informed consent.
Weddings mean different things to different people. For the invitation, I'd suggest giving a nod to the geek world, but not let it take over unless everybody you're inviting would get it (Aunt Gertie, Uncle Joe, etc..) Otherwise, some of your invitees might feel out of place before they even show up. You could show off your tech side with a little more abandon at the reception, and I don't think it would be quite so alarming. (Techie centerpieces or take-aways for the guests.)
I'd suggest something like trenslating the invitation or some other meaningful text (maybe the words to "your song") into binary and use that pattern as a border for an otherwise standard invitation. You could design it out of solid boxes for zeros and boxes with dots for the ones. It would probably work well with some sort of arts & crafts era font. Shrink it to where it's legible, but not garish. Your geek friends and relations would think it was cool, and, if they noticed it, your technologically challenged freinds and relations would be reminded of why you're the geek they can stand to be around, since you understand balancing social norms with personal expression and flair.
And, when things get stressful between now and the big day, just remember: the success of the wedding pales by comparison to the success of the marriage.
First, nowhere in the article was there any talk of mandating this clothing for anybody, let alone everybody. And while, yes, it could represent a revenue stream for AT&T, that doesn't keep this from being a very welcome development for a very large number of people. If your choices are between being confined to a nursing home so that you can be visually monitored 24/7, or being able to live a reasonably normal life monitored remotely through your clothing, most people I know would pick the latter.
Eventually most people have to pick between the lesser of two evils in some context of their lives. This, to me, seems like it's setting the "lesser" bar considerably lower.
But I know that, when you're young and invincible, it's difficult to appreciate that, despite your best efforts, your body will eventually start wearing out. In fact, most people in the West spend a lot more time in decline than in the ascent, and you've got about a one in three chance of spending at least 3 months of your life disabled in some way before the age of 65, and the likelihood of a permanent long-term disability to vision, hearing dexterity or mobility, let alone disorders like diabetes and cancer, increase every year.
While the hope is that we can each put off needing this sort of technology as long as possible, I'd much rather it was well developed both technologically and sociologically/legally by the time I need it. We need to work on legal protections for privacy. Technology is going to keep removing the physical ones.
If you feel like being cynical, that's your right. It's a free country. But I find it's best not to put too many statements out there for Karma to work with.
Where I live there is a notorious corner for crack cocain, prostitution, bloody fights, and anything you can imagine.
Despite constant city owned surveillance equipment the activity continues.
The local Diner installed speakers and pipes out jazz, classical, etc. I find it to be kind of nice mood music, for an elevator.
It has cut down on the drug dealers, kids hanging out, street performers, and the homeless who are normally sitting on the sidewalk asking for change. Apparently the softly played music is enough of an annoyance that they go away.
Miles Davis - 1 Bach - 1 Panoptic sort - 0
So their response to prostitution and bloody fights was sax and violins?
I'd hope that rather than teaching the next generation to be EVEN MORE PASSIVE, that this would instead activate the "build a better mousetrap" gene and that the next generation would design and builda a product to put this generation out of business tout de suite.
There is a natural tendency to be hamstrung by familiarity. "Since the current internet is monolithic, any future internet must also be monolithic." I suspect that in order to actually create truly secure pockets for power grid management, financial data and so forth, new infrastructures will have to be deployed in parallel to the existing network, not replacing it wholesale. Over time Internet 1.0/2.0/X.0 may or may not be supplanted as the most popular public network by a new upstart. At the same time, different communities and entities will create systems that work for them in terms of security, privacy, speed, etc, and mirror appropriate information in a controlled manner to other networks as needed. What is lost in efficiency will be compensated in flexibility and robustness.
This is just what I think is most likely, not some cause that I'm emotionally invested in. It just seems to fit trends we've seen before (which, as I mentioned in my first sentence, should be considered suspect as a matter of course.)
I always get educational toys for my nieces and nephews here, from drinking birds (classic) to light-sensitive robot kits. This year their getting brew-you-own root beer, a working electric engine kit, hand boilers . . . the trouble is limiting it. There are plenty of things not to expensive.
I speak from the point of view of someone who went to relatively prestigious Southeastern liberal arts and engineering schools. My undergraduate degree is literature, but during that time I was able to take math, philosophy, economics, history, etc. My masters is in Architecture, not exactly CS, but definitely a technical field that many enter straight out of high school and never look back (or even sideways.) I have to say that the liberal arts background has been at least as important as my technical skills in my career because of a fundamental truth: Everything that you do with your technical skills is going to be done in order to provide some sort of benefit to someone. A liberal arts background gives you a broader context from which to understand what might be important to be somebody other than yourself, and therefore a greater understanding of what you have to offer.
If you don't know that people in situation X consistently have problem Y, you won't recognize the opportunity that you have to provide a solution. This gives you an advantage whether your goals are economic, intellectual, or humanitarian.
Having a technical degree gives you a great set of tools, but a broader educational base lets you know when to use your hammer, and when a screwdriver is in order. (I'll leave that dangling straight line for the benefit of another poster.)
The problem I have with both sides of this argument is people bandying around the words "fact" and "truth" when all we have are theories.
Scientists don't say gravity is a fact, it's a theory. Evolution is not called a fact, it's a theory. Heck, trickle-down economics is a theory. I happen to believe fervently in at least two of the theories I just mentioned. The other seemed to work for a time. The point is that there's a broad range of things for which we have some level of understanding regarding their causes and the effects. It doesn't mean that you don't act on the best information that you have, but you have to be willing to admit that you can't know and that someone who disagrees with you could be closer to right than you.
The hallmark of science is that it doesn't assume that what currently seems like the most likely reason for something is unquestionably true.
My personal opinion is that global warming is a risk for which we should be preparing, whether it's caused by CO2 emissions or sunspot activity. If it comes to pass, it will involve enormous transfers of wealth, particularly in terms of agricultural economics. I don't know whether it will come to pass or not. I haven't seen anything that proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the temperature fluctuations of the last century are unusual relative to planetary history, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to mitigate against the possibility that they were. Just because I don't expect to get into a car wreck on the way home doesn't mean I don't think I should have to have insurance.
People who claim to know absolute truth are rarely scientists.
At age 35 I went back and got my M. Arch. and at 40 am plugging away at the hours I need for registration.
I'm enjoying the complexity of the field and the fact that solutions, once enacted, won't be superseded every two years. There's a permanence to it that's a complete about face from IT.
Even a small building involves thousands of decisions that all effect each other. It's not for everybody, I suppose, but I think it's the ultimate career for a dyed-in-the-wool problem solver.
Maybe this is part of the conspiracy plot Hillary's been talking about.
By making watching TV as onerous as possible, eventually it will take away the worker's desire to go home at the end of the day, thereby encouraging them to work longer hours, thereby increasing productivity.
My God! It's brilliant!
With age, I find my patience is just about to the point that I can see myself waiting until the 2 or 3 decent shows each year come out on DVD. Once my DirecTV subscription is up, I'll probably forego the whole broadcast morass.
A significant part of the problem is that global warming has been turned into a proxy argument for other issues. Ecologically minded individuals want to use it to strong-arm their entire ecological agenda. Dyed-in-the-wool capitalists need to fight against it because it is an assault on their production schedules. It's the ecology equivalent of the partial-birth abortion morass. Neither side feels they can give an inch, so even though plenty of moderates may see the potential for an effective policy somewhere in the middle which acknowleges the importance of both economic advancement and conservation, the fringes drive to make compromise impossible out of fear of a "slippery slope."
I listened to the mp3, and wasn't able to hear anything, but my skin felt like it was crawling and every hair on my arms stood up. (i just turned 40 last month.)
I only mention it in case it may be possible to get some people over the age of 25 to acknowledge that there's something going on even if they can't "hear" the sound.
over collaboration software is the fact that the recipient retains some level of control over their own time management.
I know that in a perfect world with perfect co-workers collaborative tools would help, but that's not the world most people live in.
It's amazing how many people out there are perfectly happy to spend their day filling other people's schedules, just because their own is empty. I thankfully work for a firm that bills hourly for employee time, so unnecessary meetings are avoided because there's just too much real work to do. But I have worked in several other firms where a boss or even an admin assistant's need to feel control encouraged them to regularly schedule meetings, events, etc. ad nauseum just to make sure that everyone remembered that they had the power to take hours away from your life if they wanted to. It has been my experience that when these same people get hold of collaboration software, they become even more efficient at disrupting your day. I don't ever again want to work where these people's NAGGING ABOUT MEETINGS and DISRESPECT FOR MY TIME MANAGEMENT has been AUTOMATED for them.
With e-mail, you preserve the necessity to request someone's time rather than pre-emptively assigning it for them. This little bit of politeness makes a huge difference in how difficult it is to throttle certain coworkers.
Sure, Windows will do anything most people ask of it with minimal effort. That's because people have learned better than to ask certain questions if they're in a Windows environment.
Linux users generally have learned that they don't have to take "NO" for an answer.
A monopoly is where a company uses it's dominance in the industry to prevent competition by means other than price and performance, NOT where a compny's product is seen as vastly superior and therefore little interest is shown in competing platforms. There are plenty of other portable music players, but, thankfully, there's no rule that says a certain number of people have to use other products for the sake of market diversity if what they want is an iPod.
A monopoly would be if apple used the iPod's dominance to prevent speaker manufacturers from producing speakers that worked with competing technology.
I know that learning dates is tedious, but I have to take exception with those people who are suggesting that such studies are without merit. Knowing which figures were alive at the same time, or what political/literary/artistic movements followed what major world events allows you to examine things in context, and, with luck, begin to recognize causal relationships. To take an example near and dear to many a heart here, Tolkien's trilogy is a brilliant, deep piece of literature by itself. Viewed in the context of its age, during and immediately following WWII, it takes on even more shades of meaning as social commentary, and gives great insight into how at least one British citizen was processing the fundamental changes to national character and international relationships at the dawn of a new political era in Europe.
Understanding how Einstein, Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Stravinsky, and Lenin were all creating similar revolutions in vastly different fields at roughly the same time is important, and requires a knowledge of details, including dates, not just a general familiarity with who more or less did what. Recognizing that Picasso and Einstein were both dealing with the concept of simultaneity in entirely different venues at a time when the world was rejecting the pastoral ideal in favor of a mechanized one is important to understanding how their environments catalyzed and responded to these two men's major works.
(And, for the record, understanding how an environment shapes the people who live in it is a skill which is always releveant, and requires many examples if you want to be able to extrapolate into new environments as they emerge. That is the heart of why history is important, if anyone asks you.)
"I knew it was against school policy," he said. "But I didn't know it was a felony."
The students had no respect or fear of anything short of a felony conviction. The lack of repect for authority is epidemic and comes from more sources than could be identified, but I suspect that if the administrators thought that a stern talking to would have prevented students from continuing to do the same thing in the future that they would have considered it an option. The question here shouldn't be "why did the school overreact?' It should be "why can't the students be trusted to do what they admit to knowing was the proper course of action?"
I would be a little more concerned about the long-term consequences of a felony conviction, but the students in question are minors. The charges are likely to be reduced during the legal process, and their records will be expunged at age 18.
That being said, I think it was an ill-advised program to start with, and that the school district has shown their incompetence to manage technology projects of this size. If I were a taxpayer whose hard earned money was being used for this I would be livid. The people in charge obviously did not have sufficient mental resources and/or hired expertise to reach their stated goals for this initiative, but went ahead and spent other peoples money on it anyway.
I would imagine they could have funded courses on ethics for every student in the district with the money they wasted on unnecessary hardware and software, and that those classes would have done a lot more for the future of the community than redundant computer access for a generation of students who are obviously already sufficiently computer savvy. The fact that they were able to outsmart the administration and IT staff regarding computer issues proves that they already have more understanding of these areas than is needed to get a job.
Unfortunately, people who don't bother to take the time to understand computers assume it's a lot harder than it is, so they think kids need to be educated in it. Kids have plenty of places where they can learn about computers, and it's one of the few subjects that illicits so much self-motivation. How many coffee shops offer access on demand to history or biology instructors? How many libraries have chemistry labs or a place to disect frogs, or instruction in how play an instrument with a group of like-minded people? These are offerings that are possible through schools but often are being crowded out of the budget by techology funding.
When you get right down to that, it's pretty irrational to think that there's no one out there who doesn't have every bit as much right to your house and physical property as you do. It's not their fault they weren't born into your life. Does their asserted right to your property mean that you should leave your door open to them?
Reductio ad absurdum arguments don't hold water. Artistic expression is more inherently personal than any possession could be, and therefore is deserving of more protection than physical property under the law. Protection against the trivialization and/or defiling of one's life's work by someone who lacks an initial creative spark is one of the ideas inherent in the current system.
Copyrights don't lock ideas up. The fact that a copyright exists does not preclude licensing. It does not even preclude parody, though it does make sure that certain rules are followed in that arena. It does give the artist (and/or the people the artist appoints) a limited veto against those who would usurp their voice for reasons that would go against the morality/philosophy/inspiration of their work.
The fact that the people most commonly chosen to act as agents of the artists are of suspect character does not mean that the concept of allowing the creator to maintain some control over their artistic voice is flawed.
I stand by my earlier suggestion that people who want to provide these, along with all of the other benefits of the current system, while presenting a different experience for the end user should work through *ALL* of the issues and present their plan to the artistic community. You can't just gloss over the areas that are outside of your field of expertise. There are a whole host of issues that go well beyond distribution systems that must be resolved.
If you can take the time and make the effort to come up with something better, I'm sure you'll be able to get artists to sign up. There's lots of money available to fund the conversion once the plan is in place. All of those "ill-gotten-gains" the record companies are rolling in would be up for redistribution.
I can sing "Strawberry Fields Forever" any time I want for my own enjoyment. I have yet to hear someone complaining about copyrights say, "I'll show them. I'll learn to play an instrument and compose my own music." There's a certain leech-like quality to the common Slashdot stance that I'm not sure I agree with. It's one thing to not want to pay for the same work over and over. It's another to think you have the right to absolutely any experience made possible by someone elses labor.
It was obviously worth the trade off to the musician to put the copyright into the hands of the record company. It's like selling a winning lottery ticket at a discount. It may seem to an outsider like the winner got short changed, but it may just be that they have a different translation factor for the value of money they won't see for years. Artists are not all slaves of the music industry (even if a few have been ripped off.) If you think they're selling themselves or their artistic integrity too cheaply, its because no one is offering them a better price. If alternative distribution channels gave them the benefits they want, they'd move to them. The fact that these channels aren't comparable is apparent from the fact that they aren't moving to them. It's an economic decision that they have the right to make for themselves.
If you want to control the copyright of music, then create music. Or create an alternative to the current distribution system that meets **ALL** of the artists' needs, so that they will sell their copyrights to you rather than someone else.
even under the scenario outlined. A few people download the show and through word of mouth, the show gets additional publicity and becomes more profitable in the intended distribution model. This works well as long as the initial pirating audience is kept to a relatively trivial volume, so that there is a sufficiently great number of people who will see it in the primary venue.
By scaring as many people away from this secondary market as possible, they make this possible. The decision to spread fear of the secondary distribution model makes sense as a means to limit loss without destroying the benefits because they can be reasonably sure that a) many young computer users will assume that THEY can't ve caught and will continue to pirate, and b) there will always be some new network that will allow them to keep the fiction alive that they are making a concerted effort to catch all the pirates, but that they are just one step behind. Their ideal situation would be a secondary market that was sufficiently obscure that 98% of the potential audience would decide that it wasn't worth the effort, and then they could let the other 2% be. Unfortunately the tools keep getting easier to use, so that obscurity no longer works as a deterrent to particpation.
They neither need or want to stop everybody. They merely need to limit the size of the "seed" audience. That's why they only go after a few hundred people at a time, rather than the tens of thousands of names they have. Its about creating enough fear to limit without destroying the P2P marketing phenomenon.
If TV gets this inconvenient, I might just have to go buy me one of them "books" I keep hearin' 'bout and watch it instead. Ain't heard nothin' 'bout any flags on those yet.
Why would you complain that someone pays for the entertainment they appreciate? A million dollars or so is not out of line with what the very rich might pay for other forms of entertainment over the course of a year. (Think about how much it costs to maintain a yacht, or a race car fixation.) In this instance, they happen to be willing to share the benefit of their bounty. By spending the money this way, rather than on some specific program like space camp, it has the potential to reach a much larger audience which includes people who don't already dream about space camp because "science is cool" is not part of their environment. It's not the only way the money could be spent, but that doesn't mean it's not a valid way to spend it. Other people make other choices.
Besides, what are the odds that UPN would fill the time slot with something better? From my point of view, at least it's not more reality programming or laugh-track sitcom.
Slashdot Mirror
I read That Hideous Strength in college for a class on the Arthurian tradition. Twenty-five years later, I still remember the paper I wroute contrasting the men trying to create a god by separating a man from his body, and the example of the Christan God taking up the burden of a body in order to fulfill his role as a deity. (Hey, it's a C. S. Lewis story.)
I went back and read the other boods subsequently. I thought they worked better as allegory than as sci-fi, but were interesting enough.
Imagine a man and a woman retiring to his apartment for an intimate evening. As they enter the door, a beep sounds, and he goes to a keypad to turn off the alarm siren before it wakes the building. He tells her, "Yeah, I got a security system last year after a break in. It's got all the bells and whistles. Let me put in "At home" mode.
After a mutually gratifying, consensual evening, she goes home.
The next day she discovers videos of their evening on the internet.
When she confronts him, he replies, "Hey, the cameras are part of my security system. I told you it had all the bells and whistles and that I was putting it in "at home" mode. That means the cameras go on to identify anybody who comes in to attack me. The footage is my property. You didin't object to it last night, and since the recording has commercial value, I decided to sell it. You consented by not objecting before we started. It's too late now to complain, the video exists. I might as well make money off of it."
I don't think it's unreasonable of her to assume that the video could not legally be published without her explicit, informed consent.
Weddings mean different things to different people. For the invitation, I'd suggest giving a nod to the geek world, but not let it take over unless everybody you're inviting would get it (Aunt Gertie, Uncle Joe, etc..) Otherwise, some of your invitees might feel out of place before they even show up. You could show off your tech side with a little more abandon at the reception, and I don't think it would be quite so alarming. (Techie centerpieces or take-aways for the guests.)
I'd suggest something like trenslating the invitation or some other meaningful text (maybe the words to "your song") into binary and use that pattern as a border for an otherwise standard invitation. You could design it out of solid boxes for zeros and boxes with dots for the ones. It would probably work well with some sort of arts & crafts era font. Shrink it to where it's legible, but not garish. Your geek friends and relations would think it was cool, and, if they noticed it, your technologically challenged freinds and relations would be reminded of why you're the geek they can stand to be around, since you understand balancing social norms with personal expression and flair.
And, when things get stressful between now and the big day, just remember: the success of the wedding pales by comparison to the success of the marriage.
First, nowhere in the article was there any talk of mandating this clothing for anybody, let alone everybody. And while, yes, it could represent a revenue stream for AT&T, that doesn't keep this from being a very welcome development for a very large number of people. If your choices are between being confined to a nursing home so that you can be visually monitored 24/7, or being able to live a reasonably normal life monitored remotely through your clothing, most people I know would pick the latter.
Eventually most people have to pick between the lesser of two evils in some context of their lives. This, to me, seems like it's setting the "lesser" bar considerably lower.
But I know that, when you're young and invincible, it's difficult to appreciate that, despite your best efforts, your body will eventually start wearing out. In fact, most people in the West spend a lot more time in decline than in the ascent, and you've got about a one in three chance of spending at least 3 months of your life disabled in some way before the age of 65, and the likelihood of a permanent long-term disability to vision, hearing dexterity or mobility, let alone disorders like diabetes and cancer, increase every year.
While the hope is that we can each put off needing this sort of technology as long as possible, I'd much rather it was well developed both technologically and sociologically/legally by the time I need it. We need to work on legal protections for privacy. Technology is going to keep removing the physical ones.
If you feel like being cynical, that's your right. It's a free country. But I find it's best not to put too many statements out there for Karma to work with.
Where I live there is a notorious corner for crack cocain, prostitution, bloody fights, and anything you can imagine.
Despite constant city owned surveillance equipment the activity continues.
The local Diner installed speakers and pipes out jazz, classical, etc. I find it to be kind of nice mood music, for an elevator.
It has cut down on the drug dealers, kids hanging out, street performers, and the homeless who are normally sitting on the sidewalk asking for change. Apparently the softly played music is enough of an annoyance that they go away.
Miles Davis - 1
Bach - 1
Panoptic sort - 0
So their response to prostitution and bloody fights was sax and violins?
I'd hope that rather than teaching the next generation to be EVEN MORE PASSIVE, that this would instead activate the "build a better mousetrap" gene and that the next generation would design and builda a product to put this generation out of business tout de suite.
There is a natural tendency to be hamstrung by familiarity. "Since the current internet is monolithic, any future internet must also be monolithic." I suspect that in order to actually create truly secure pockets for power grid management, financial data and so forth, new infrastructures will have to be deployed in parallel to the existing network, not replacing it wholesale. Over time Internet 1.0/2.0/X.0 may or may not be supplanted as the most popular public network by a new upstart. At the same time, different communities and entities will create systems that work for them in terms of security, privacy, speed, etc, and mirror appropriate information in a controlled manner to other networks as needed. What is lost in efficiency will be compensated in flexibility and robustness.
This is just what I think is most likely, not some cause that I'm emotionally invested in. It just seems to fit trends we've seen before (which, as I mentioned in my first sentence, should be considered suspect as a matter of course.)
scientificsonline.com
I always get educational toys for my nieces and nephews here, from drinking birds (classic) to light-sensitive robot kits. This year their getting brew-you-own root beer, a working electric engine kit, hand boilers . . . the trouble is limiting it. There are plenty of things not to expensive.
I speak from the point of view of someone who went to relatively prestigious Southeastern liberal arts and engineering schools. My undergraduate degree is literature, but during that time I was able to take math, philosophy, economics, history, etc. My masters is in Architecture, not exactly CS, but definitely a technical field that many enter straight out of high school and never look back (or even sideways.) I have to say that the liberal arts background has been at least as important as my technical skills in my career because of a fundamental truth: Everything that you do with your technical skills is going to be done in order to provide some sort of benefit to someone. A liberal arts background gives you a broader context from which to understand what might be important to be somebody other than yourself, and therefore a greater understanding of what you have to offer.
If you don't know that people in situation X consistently have problem Y, you won't recognize the opportunity that you have to provide a solution. This gives you an advantage whether your goals are economic, intellectual, or humanitarian.
Having a technical degree gives you a great set of tools, but a broader educational base lets you know when to use your hammer, and when a screwdriver is in order. (I'll leave that dangling straight line for the benefit of another poster.)
The problem I have with both sides of this argument is people bandying around the words "fact" and "truth" when all we have are theories.
Scientists don't say gravity is a fact, it's a theory. Evolution is not called a fact, it's a theory. Heck, trickle-down economics is a theory. I happen to believe fervently in at least two of the theories I just mentioned. The other seemed to work for a time. The point is that there's a broad range of things for which we have some level of understanding regarding their causes and the effects. It doesn't mean that you don't act on the best information that you have, but you have to be willing to admit that you can't know and that someone who disagrees with you could be closer to right than you.
The hallmark of science is that it doesn't assume that what currently seems like the most likely reason for something is unquestionably true.
My personal opinion is that global warming is a risk for which we should be preparing, whether it's caused by CO2 emissions or sunspot activity. If it comes to pass, it will involve enormous transfers of wealth, particularly in terms of agricultural economics. I don't know whether it will come to pass or not. I haven't seen anything that proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the temperature fluctuations of the last century are unusual relative to planetary history, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to mitigate against the possibility that they were. Just because I don't expect to get into a car wreck on the way home doesn't mean I don't think I should have to have insurance.
People who claim to know absolute truth are rarely scientists.
At age 35 I went back and got my M. Arch. and at 40 am plugging away at the hours I need for registration.
I'm enjoying the complexity of the field and the fact that solutions, once enacted, won't be superseded every two years. There's a permanence to it that's a complete about face from IT.
Even a small building involves thousands of decisions that all effect each other. It's not for everybody, I suppose, but I think it's the ultimate career for a dyed-in-the-wool problem solver.
Maybe this is part of the conspiracy plot Hillary's been talking about.
By making watching TV as onerous as possible, eventually it will take away the worker's desire to go home at the end of the day, thereby encouraging them to work longer hours, thereby increasing productivity.
My God! It's brilliant!
With age, I find my patience is just about to the point that I can see myself waiting until the 2 or 3 decent shows each year come out on DVD. Once my DirecTV subscription is up, I'll probably forego the whole broadcast morass.
A significant part of the problem is that global warming has been turned into a proxy argument for other issues. Ecologically minded individuals want to use it to strong-arm their entire ecological agenda. Dyed-in-the-wool capitalists need to fight against it because it is an assault on their production schedules. It's the ecology equivalent of the partial-birth abortion morass. Neither side feels they can give an inch, so even though plenty of moderates may see the potential for an effective policy somewhere in the middle which acknowleges the importance of both economic advancement and conservation, the fringes drive to make compromise impossible out of fear of a "slippery slope."
I listened to the mp3, and wasn't able to hear anything, but my skin felt like it was crawling and every hair on my arms stood up. (i just turned 40 last month.)
I only mention it in case it may be possible to get some people over the age of 25 to acknowledge that there's something going on even if they can't "hear" the sound.
over collaboration software is the fact that the recipient retains some level of control over their own time management.
I know that in a perfect world with perfect co-workers collaborative tools would help, but that's not the world most people live in.
It's amazing how many people out there are perfectly happy to spend their day filling other people's schedules, just because their own is empty. I thankfully work for a firm that bills hourly for employee time, so unnecessary meetings are avoided because there's just too much real work to do. But I have worked in several other firms where a boss or even an admin assistant's need to feel control encouraged them to regularly schedule meetings, events, etc. ad nauseum just to make sure that everyone remembered that they had the power to take hours away from your life if they wanted to. It has been my experience that when these same people get hold of collaboration software, they become even more efficient at disrupting your day. I don't ever again want to work where these people's NAGGING ABOUT MEETINGS and DISRESPECT FOR MY TIME MANAGEMENT has been AUTOMATED for them.
With e-mail, you preserve the necessity to request someone's time rather than pre-emptively assigning it for them. This little bit of politeness makes a huge difference in how difficult it is to throttle certain coworkers.
I think they will be treated fairly, and I would want nothing less.
I don't think that a fair response to their abuses is actually what they want, though.
I'm guessing Bill meant to be asking for MERCY, not fairness.
Sure, Windows will do anything most people ask of it with minimal effort. That's because people have learned better than to ask certain questions if they're in a Windows environment.
Linux users generally have learned that they don't have to take "NO" for an answer.
A monopoly is where a company uses it's dominance in the industry to prevent competition by means other than price and performance, NOT where a compny's product is seen as vastly superior and therefore little interest is shown in competing platforms. There are plenty of other portable music players, but, thankfully, there's no rule that says a certain number of people have to use other products for the sake of market diversity if what they want is an iPod.
A monopoly would be if apple used the iPod's dominance to prevent speaker manufacturers from producing speakers that worked with competing technology.
I know that learning dates is tedious, but I have to take exception with those people who are suggesting that such studies are without merit. Knowing which figures were alive at the same time, or what political/literary/artistic movements followed what major world events allows you to examine things in context, and, with luck, begin to recognize causal relationships. To take an example near and dear to many a heart here, Tolkien's trilogy is a brilliant, deep piece of literature by itself. Viewed in the context of its age, during and immediately following WWII, it takes on even more shades of meaning as social commentary, and gives great insight into how at least one British citizen was processing the fundamental changes to national character and international relationships at the dawn of a new political era in Europe.
Understanding how Einstein, Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Stravinsky, and Lenin were all creating similar revolutions in vastly different fields at roughly the same time is important, and requires a knowledge of details, including dates, not just a general familiarity with who more or less did what. Recognizing that Picasso and Einstein were both dealing with the concept of simultaneity in entirely different venues at a time when the world was rejecting the pastoral ideal in favor of a mechanized one is important to understanding how their environments catalyzed and responded to these two men's major works.
(And, for the record, understanding how an environment shapes the people who live in it is a skill which is always releveant, and requires many examples if you want to be able to extrapolate into new environments as they emerge. That is the heart of why history is important, if anyone asks you.)
"I knew it was against school policy," he said. "But I didn't know it was a felony."
The students had no respect or fear of anything short of a felony conviction. The lack of repect for authority is epidemic and comes from more sources than could be identified, but I suspect that if the administrators thought that a stern talking to would have prevented students from continuing to do the same thing in the future that they would have considered it an option. The question here shouldn't be "why did the school overreact?' It should be "why can't the students be trusted to do what they admit to knowing was the proper course of action?"
I would be a little more concerned about the long-term consequences of a felony conviction, but the students in question are minors. The charges are likely to be reduced during the legal process, and their records will be expunged at age 18.
That being said, I think it was an ill-advised program to start with, and that the school district has shown their incompetence to manage technology projects of this size. If I were a taxpayer whose hard earned money was being used for this I would be livid. The people in charge obviously did not have sufficient mental resources and/or hired expertise to reach their stated goals for this initiative, but went ahead and spent other peoples money on it anyway.
I would imagine they could have funded courses on ethics for every student in the district with the money they wasted on unnecessary hardware and software, and that those classes would have done a lot more for the future of the community than redundant computer access for a generation of students who are obviously already sufficiently computer savvy. The fact that they were able to outsmart the administration and IT staff regarding computer issues proves that they already have more understanding of these areas than is needed to get a job.
Unfortunately, people who don't bother to take the time to understand computers assume it's a lot harder than it is, so they think kids need to be educated in it. Kids have plenty of places where they can learn about computers, and it's one of the few subjects that illicits so much self-motivation. How many coffee shops offer access on demand to history or biology instructors? How many libraries have chemistry labs or a place to disect frogs, or instruction in how play an instrument with a group of like-minded people? These are offerings that are possible through schools but often are being crowded out of the budget by techology funding.
When you get right down to that, it's pretty irrational to think that there's no one out there who doesn't have every bit as much right to your house and physical property as you do. It's not their fault they weren't born into your life. Does their asserted right to your property mean that you should leave your door open to them?
Reductio ad absurdum arguments don't hold water. Artistic expression is more inherently personal than any possession could be, and therefore is deserving of more protection than physical property under the law. Protection against the trivialization and/or defiling of one's life's work by someone who lacks an initial creative spark is one of the ideas inherent in the current system.
Copyrights don't lock ideas up. The fact that a copyright exists does not preclude licensing. It does not even preclude parody, though it does make sure that certain rules are followed in that arena. It does give the artist (and/or the people the artist appoints) a limited veto against those who would usurp their voice for reasons that would go against the morality/philosophy/inspiration of their work.
The fact that the people most commonly chosen to act as agents of the artists are of suspect character does not mean that the concept of allowing the creator to maintain some control over their artistic voice is flawed.
I stand by my earlier suggestion that people who want to provide these, along with all of the other benefits of the current system, while presenting a different experience for the end user should work through *ALL* of the issues and present their plan to the artistic community. You can't just gloss over the areas that are outside of your field of expertise. There are a whole host of issues that go well beyond distribution systems that must be resolved.
If you can take the time and make the effort to come up with something better, I'm sure you'll be able to get artists to sign up. There's lots of money available to fund the conversion once the plan is in place. All of those "ill-gotten-gains" the record companies are rolling in would be up for redistribution.
I can sing "Strawberry Fields Forever" any time I want for my own enjoyment. I have yet to hear someone complaining about copyrights say, "I'll show them. I'll learn to play an instrument and compose my own music." There's a certain leech-like quality to the common Slashdot stance that I'm not sure I agree with. It's one thing to not want to pay for the same work over and over. It's another to think you have the right to absolutely any experience made possible by someone elses labor.
It was obviously worth the trade off to the musician to put the copyright into the hands of the record company. It's like selling a winning lottery ticket at a discount. It may seem to an outsider like the winner got short changed, but it may just be that they have a different translation factor for the value of money they won't see for years. Artists are not all slaves of the music industry (even if a few have been ripped off.) If you think they're selling themselves or their artistic integrity too cheaply, its because no one is offering them a better price. If alternative distribution channels gave them the benefits they want, they'd move to them. The fact that these channels aren't comparable is apparent from the fact that they aren't moving to them. It's an economic decision that they have the right to make for themselves.
If you want to control the copyright of music, then create music. Or create an alternative to the current distribution system that meets **ALL** of the artists' needs, so that they will sell their copyrights to you rather than someone else.
even under the scenario outlined. A few people download the show and through word of mouth, the show gets additional publicity and becomes more profitable in the intended distribution model. This works well as long as the initial pirating audience is kept to a relatively trivial volume, so that there is a sufficiently great number of people who will see it in the primary venue.
By scaring as many people away from this secondary market as possible, they make this possible. The decision to spread fear of the secondary distribution model makes sense as a means to limit loss without destroying the benefits because they can be reasonably sure that a) many young computer users will assume that THEY can't ve caught and will continue to pirate, and b) there will always be some new network that will allow them to keep the fiction alive that they are making a concerted effort to catch all the pirates, but that they are just one step behind. Their ideal situation would be a secondary market that was sufficiently obscure that 98% of the potential audience would decide that it wasn't worth the effort, and then they could let the other 2% be. Unfortunately the tools keep getting easier to use, so that obscurity no longer works as a deterrent to particpation.
They neither need or want to stop everybody. They merely need to limit the size of the "seed" audience. That's why they only go after a few hundred people at a time, rather than the tens of thousands of names they have. Its about creating enough fear to limit without destroying the P2P marketing phenomenon.
If TV gets this inconvenient, I might just have to go buy me one of them "books" I keep hearin' 'bout and watch it instead. Ain't heard nothin' 'bout any flags on those yet.
Why would you complain that someone pays for the entertainment they appreciate? A million dollars or so is not out of line with what the very rich might pay for other forms of entertainment over the course of a year. (Think about how much it costs to maintain a yacht, or a race car fixation.) In this instance, they happen to be willing to share the benefit of their bounty. By spending the money this way, rather than on some specific program like space camp, it has the potential to reach a much larger audience which includes people who don't already dream about space camp because "science is cool" is not part of their environment. It's not the only way the money could be spent, but that doesn't mean it's not a valid way to spend it. Other people make other choices.
Besides, what are the odds that UPN would fill the time slot with something better? From my point of view, at least it's not more reality programming or laugh-track sitcom.