I charge a reasonable rate (depending on the job up to $15 an hour plus gas, and travel time). I am not getting rich by any means
Upto $15/hr!? Yeah, you're not getting rich.
The commonly given reason for freelancing instead of going through an agency is that you make more per hour freelancing. Well, I did agency (temping) tech support and started at $16/hr.
With all this information, maybe he can tell me when they're going install my damn DSL line...
Why, yes, yes you can! Says here, hmmm, where you are, looks like a couple of week after they can lay the trunk across the ice bridge between the 4th and 5th levels of hell. HTH, HAND!:)
If the service is not designed to be used by a group of people; ie Ice cream sundae booths are not meant to be used by people allergic to milk. Should these people be able to sue the owners to make the owners use milk free ice cream?
No. But if the ice cream vendor refused to sell to them or refused to let them into the building because they were allergic, they could sue.
That is the proper analogy to setting up a website that refuses to serve blind people.... and, since no one has mentioned it, those with poor vision, a much, much larger population, as all those baby boomers hit later middle age and start needing reading glasses.
Does this example apply to the situation of an online service?
No. The basic premise is that businesses above a certain size don't get to pick and choose whom they do business with by any criteria except those which directly pertain to the transaction (customer's credit-worthiness, e.g.).
I have come to the view that this is actually a necessary principle for a capitalistic democracy/republic to hold, similar in nature to requiring restraints upon the government to legislate (e.g. the US Bill of Rights), if that society is to thrive. Not only is it necessary for all peoples to be protected from the tyranny of the majority in legislative matters, so ethnic or religious minorities don't get voted into gulags and concentration camps, it is also necessary that all people's guaranteed access to the market must be protected from the tyranny of the majority in economic matters.
Otherwise, taking the notion of "you get to discriminate against whom you like" to its logical conclusion, the majority can decide they don't like selling food, fertilizer, or land to a minority, and starve them to death. Or keep them in a state of thralldom through enforced crushing poverty, which is what has essentially happened to black people in the US for generations.
You are aware aren't you, that there is NO legal way to set up a storefront retail operation without some form of contact info being a matter of public record? Why should a seller on eBay be any different? What person in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to have a market in which vendors are anonymous??? Do you really think it's fair as a seller to offer your buyers no reliable, verifiable way to contact you? Would you really buy anything off eBay if you thought for a minute that sellers were immune to being located except via extraordinary means?
Gods, this is so stupid, I don't know where to start. First and foremost, by default it should be up to the two parties involved in commerce to decide what level of anonymity or identity they are willing to treat under. If I am comfortable buying something from someone anonymous and untrackable, as I have done many times in my life, that's my prerogative. If a seller says they will only treat with me anonymously and I don't like that, I don't have to buy from them.
My objection is to being forced to do business one way or the other. It would be just as bad to be forced to have always anonymous business as it would to have never anonymous business.
And for those of you dimwits who can't imagine a legitimate use one might have for anonymous commerce, I suggest you look into the history of birthcontrol and sex ed. The government has a nasty habit of being coopted by moralists who criminalize vending medicines, medical devices and information that they disapprove of.
Myself, I'm a pretty fast typist, but I use sort of a modified hunt-and-peck method. I use about three fingers on each hand and I can basically hunt-and-peck AND touch type. Scary. But anyway, my hands are constantly roaming all over the keyboard like a pianist, almost... I actually feel like this really PREVENTS stress injuries, since I've got a wide range of motion going on.
Uh, dude? That's how I type (only with more than three fingers:) because I never took a typing class, but studied piano since the age of 5. Until I was about 30, it worked great for me, too. Then the tendonitis in my elbows kicked in. CTS is not the only RSI.
Typing like a pianist sounds like a splendid idea, right up to the point you find out how many pianists have RSIs! It is the occupational hazzard for professional musicians, to the point that sports medicine clinics are increasingly catering to musicians who have badly wacked their bodies in pursuit of their careers. I personally know a scary number of musicians who have crippled themselves playing.
No doubt it depends a great deal on context--and it probably has also evolved significantly over time. It's like the term 'geek'. Earlier in this century, a geek was "a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake."
So, there I was, with some other technologist acquaintances, and I made passing referrence to being "geeks". One archly sniffed and said, "You bite the heads off live chickens?" To which I replied, of course, "Don't be silly; these days we bite heads off live users."
Descartes was one of the first christian philosophers to actually try to find other explanations for the way things worked other than "God willed it that way"
If he was, he wasn't terribly successful. In the Meditations, "God willed it that way" is what follows right after "Cogito, ergo sum". Specifically, Descartes argues
He might be a battery.
Cogito ergo sum. This gets us to "I exist", but he spends the rest of Med. II belaboring the fact that it gets us absolutely no further, that all he can know of himself is that he exists.
So in Med. III he turns to examining the plausibility of there being a Deceiver.
Which he tells us he will approach thus... "But, that I may be able wholly to remove it, I must inquire whether there is a God, as soon as an opportunity of doing so shall present itself; and if I find that there is a God, I must examine likewise whether he can be a deceiver; for, without the knowledge of these two truths, I do not see that I can ever be certain of anything."
So he goes into a proof of the existence of God based on the idea that if he has an idea of God, God must exist.
From there, he explains how he knows God is a nice guy who would never deceive him:
"And, in truth, it is not to be wondered at that God, at my creation, implanted this idea in me, that it might serve, as it were, for the mark of the workman impressed on his work; and it is not also necessary that the mark should be something different from the work itself; but considering only that God is my creator, it is highly probable that he in some way fashioned me after his own image and likeness, and that I perceive this likeness, in which is contained the idea of God, by the same faculty by which I apprehend myself, in other words, when I make myself the object of reflection, I not only find that I am an incomplete, [imperfect] and dependent being, and one who unceasingly aspires after something better and greater than he is; but, at the same time, I am assured likewise that he upon whom I am dependent possesses in himself all the goods after which I aspire [and the ideas of which I find in my mind], and that not merely indefinitely and potentially, but infinitely and actually, and that he is thus God. And the whole force of the argument of which I have here availed myself to establish the existence of God, consists in this, that I perceive I could not possibly be of such a nature as I am, and yet have in my mind the idea of a God, if God did not in reality exist--this same God, I say, whose idea is in my mind--that is, a being who possesses all those lofty perfections, of which the mind may have some slight conception, without, however, being able fully to comprehend them, and who is wholly superior to all defect [ and has nothing that marks imperfection]: whence it is sufficiently manifest that he cannot be a deceiver, since it is a dictate of the natural light that all fraud and deception spring from some defect."
Which is a pretty crummy argument, logically speaking. It boils down to "I just know God wouldn't do that to us. Mneh." There doesn't seem (to my eye) to be any argument in the Meditations that it is possible to know whether we are philosophers or butterflies, save that rests on the presumption of the knowledge of God (and a very particular conception of "God", too).
1. Inculcation of desirable physical traits like strength, coordination and grace
Perhaps. But given the amateurish level of coaching and training, wouldn't these best be served by tossing a ball in the backyard with dad, or playing pickup games?[snip for length]
Irrelevant, actually. I listed those three items as purposes, not outcomes. As to whether those purposes are attained is obviously contingent upon many things. Furthermore, they are the purposes as to why someone would choose them for themselves, not why a parent would choose them for their child.
The kids may start in activities through some desire, but not always. And continuing is often upon orders by the parent.
Yes, being impelled to continue is bad.
There's something to be said for teaching kids to follow through, but there's also serious danger of burnout for these kids.
I don't know if you're implying here that a parent ordering their child to continue doing something teaches that child to follow through. I have not found that to be true. Quite the opposite. I find it quite shocking how many gifted young people I know who are convinced that "If I weren't made to do it, I wouldn't be able to stick it out" about anything that has to do with self-improvement. Particularly distressing was the seminar at MIT in which I heard a bunch of undergrads express that opinion of themselves.
Surely teaching a child how to persevere is a vital part of their upbringing. I am quite sure I don't know how to do it. But I am also quite sure that forcing a child teaches the child to rely on being forced. It makes children lazy!
At any rate, yes, burn out is a big problem, especially among those whose experience of an activity -- any activity -- is as of a forced march!
Kids need some down time. Look at the week for a school age kid. 30 hours of school per week. Ten hours of homework (and from what I hear, that's incredibly generous. Many places give much more homework.) 5-10 hours of after school activities or daycare, which often features structured activities. Throw in some games and/or recitals on the weekend, and you're getting close to a 60 hour week. That's strenuous on adults. How does that affect an eight year old?
Agreed. Of course, I don't consider the problem to be the enrichment activities such as may be lumped under "after school activities"; I consider the problem to be the loads of busywork homework they load kids down with.
I'm also not sure that all of these activities are any less detrimental to the imagination of young children than television. With so much time spent focused, where is the time to day dream?
Agreed. The other problem I would have were I a child now, with much of the way children's lives are organized today, is that children are required to spend all their time in herds. I am an introverted person, and need quiet solitude to think, compose, write, reflect, etc. I do better learning one-on-one or in small groups. So many enrichment activities -- and all classroom time -- happen in big groups. I studied music one-on-one with a private instructor; I studied art the same way.
It's interesting. IMO, the people who are running themselves ragged to have their kids do piano, soccer, ballet, etc, etc, etc. are the ones with sour grapes. They view their own childhoods as 'wasted', and vow not to let their children waste time.
No, not in my experience. Those parents I know who seem to always be running around to their kids' activities don't have that attitude at all. They seem to be trying to keep up with the kids -- who seem quite able to say "I don't want to be in that activity".
Of course, one of the issues here is that complaining about the detrimental effects of too many activities gives parents who don't want to support their kids a handy out. They can claim, to themselves if no one else, that they're doing their kids a favor by insisting on the kid not doing activities.
I think the critical difference here is that it was YOUR choice to take all that on, NOT your parents decision that you need to do these things.
You miss my point. Nobody disagrees with that. We all agree here on what is good vs. bad. The thing I'm wondering is: Which is happening? Is it the parents who are making those decisions? I'm cynical enough to wonder if it might not, instead, be the case that the kids take it on happily themselves, and the people going on about how awful it is for parents to make kids take all that stuff on are... other parents.
After all, it's a common sport for parents who don't support their kids to sneer at parents who do as "pushy". It's not to say there aren't pushy parents, just that there's a hell of a lot of insecure parents who are happy to slander another parent just to make themselves feel better about what they are or aren't providing to their own kids. "Isn't it terrible what Mrs. Jones is doing to little Janey making her take all those ballet classes and chess lessons. What a wonderful parent I am for sparing my child those opportun^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpressures"
When I hear someone say "Oh! Oh! Think of the children!" my cynicism gets turned up to 11.
Working on the family farm had purpose. Rushing to soccer/ballet has no purpose.
They don't? I thought their purpose was
Inculcation of desirable physical traits like strength, coordination and grace
Honing of talent, and intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic self-improvement
Entertainment
I'm completely willing to believe I'm badly out of the loop, but aren't those things kids do because they enjoy them? I kept as heavy a performing arts schedule as I could manage, when I was a kid (the limiting factor was my mother's willingness/ability to schlep me around to places.)
Guess what? Until very recently, I kept as heavy a performing arts schedule as I could manage, as an adult. I enjoyed it.
I find all this handwringing about kids' heavy activity levels to be somewhat boggling. As much as I did, it still felt to me like I was kept in a state of enforced boredom; I enjoyed what activities I did get to do mightily, but until HS, they never felt like close to enough.
I grasp that too much of a good thing is not a good thing. But it seems that it's adults who are wailing and gnashing their teeth over kids schedules, not the kids. Or at least, far less frequently the kids. Maybe I'm way off base, but I can't help wondering if it's just that there's a lot of adults who are jealous of what kids get to do, and have a bad case of Sour Grapes.
When you write for, bud don't pander to, children, the results are things such as
Tom Sawyer, Watership Down, and A Wrinkle in Time.
Are you referring to film versions of these or
the original writing? I ask because I'd be interested to learn if there was a film of A Wrinkle in Time and if it were any good.
However, if you're referring to the books, AFAIK, Watership Down was not written for children. Weighing in at nearly 1000 pages (paperback), and having some, what is the ephemism? oh, "explicit" violence (the account of the Sandleford Warren is pretty damn gruesome), it was always intended for adult readers. That is not to say it is inappropriate for children. Those children who are up to reading 1000 page allegorical novels about political systems, who don't still get nightmares, are in for a real treat. I read it at the age of about 13, and thought it the single most thrilling thing I'd ever read; I still think it's one of the most thrilling things I've ever read. I strongly recommend this book to GT kids; if you can make it through the first 60 pages, the book will sweep you up and carry you the rest of the way.
I don't see how it is expensive or difficult to put your business online. Use FrontPage or Dreamweaver to build the web site. Hosting a low bandwidth site should not cost more than $20/month, and getting merchant acounts is easy and cheap. It cost me ~$200 to set up my accounts with Visa, MC, Amex, and Discover, and as far as 'shopping carts', the gateway I use offers one for free.
Allow me to enlighten you.
The small business people being discussed are people who wouldn't know Dreamweaver from a hole in the ground, and whose time -- that is the time it would take them to learn what it is -- is extremely precious in a purely financial sense.
They do not know what they are shopping for in the first place -- not knowing the difference between a domain name registrar and a hosting company and a web design house, for instance -- much less how to go about shopping around for them. How the hell should they know how many [k|M|G]b of storage a month they need? Or what bandwidth would be the best use of their money? Or what features they might want? How should they know whether they need the $20/mo account with static pages or the $200/mo account with php/mysql/etc, when they have no idea what these things are or why -- or how -- they'd use them.
Sure, they could learn all this. But it takes time and effort which your typical small business really doesn't have to invest. They no more want to implement their own web presence than they want to implement their own plumbing.
From the point of view of a small business, hiring someone to develop -- and subsequently maintain -- their web presence is like installing a shunt directly into their bank accounts. Being non-techies, they have no idea how to manage a technical contractor nor their technical contracting expenses, even those as humble as a high school student slinging some HTML on a summer vacation, as some idiot proposed.
So, from what I've seen, a company that helps small businesses get on the web, is benefiting from the fact that these mom and pops assume it is very expensive and time consuming. (just my.02)
The fact of the matter is that unless you know what you're doing -- and it is precisely people who don't know what they're doing when it comes to the web that we are discussing -- getting your small business on line can be very expensive and time consuming. It can take your company to the cleaners.
The commonest way that small businesses -- and the geeks that work for them -- screw this one up is that the business hires someone to "make a web site for them", and the geek obligingly puts together some static web pages, buys them a domain, and parks the pages there. The geek never mentions maintainability, and the small business never thinks to ask.
And the next thing you know, the small business has to pay a specialist every time they want to change a price on the web site.
Another thing the small business never thinks to ask about is backups. Or content versioning.
All these things start nickle-and-diming the business to death. That is why prudent small businesses are wicked leery of moving on to the web. And why this company is going to do well: they're basically providing small businesses with a Content Management System. They won't need specialists to maintain their pages for them, and their costs will be strictly controlled.
Then there's the issue of archiving. If a project runs off a DB and is only usable in Netscape 4, how do we archive it so that in 50 years we can view it? Do we archive just the software? What if future hardware can't run it? Do we archive the hardware as well?
Heh. Welcome to the world of "Historically Informed Performance", as we music/dance/theater history nuts call it. That's where you put on a concert of say, Handel, using only the varieties and forms of instruments available in Handel's day.
I can see it now, "A MOMA Retrospective: The Dawn of Digital Art, 1970-2010. On historically authentic servers and clients, meticulously reconstructed by digital art historians! For a limited time only!"
She, on the other hand, believes that we shouldn't meddle, because if we do as I just described, it's a small step to handing prospective parents a form, letting them choose their baby's sex, hair colour, height, etc. I say, "so what?" Once again, why *wouldn't* you want to let people choose what their children will look like?
It turns out there is a good scientific answer why not. Before explaining it, I'd like to state for the record that I am pro-progress; the idea of voluntary eugenics isn't a problem for me -- except for this niggling technical detail.
The reason that allowing each individual set of parents to decide on the genetic disposition of their children is bad is that
People are predisposed to fads; they will individually make decisions which amount to everyone having increasingly similar genetic make up. All the same eye color, all smarter, all without certain predispositions to disease.
Genetic homogeneity is makes a species brittle. The term you'll hear used for this is "monocrop". A monocrop is when a species gets too genetically homogeneous. A monocrop is a situation ripe for a genetic/biological disaster.
The most famous example of Why Monocrops Are Bad is the Great Potato Famine of Ireland. Potatos had become the staple crop (i.e. what everyone ate) of Ireland, but they're not a native species. All the potatos plants of Ireland were decended from fewer than a dozen potato plants imported from Peru. Because the millions of potatos plants descended from those initial imports all shared the same extremely small genetic pool, they shared the same weeknesses. A disease came along (actually a fungus, IIRC) which none of them were resistant too. The plants all died, and then the people relying upon those plants for food started dieing -- millions of them.
And lest you think this is a function of the plants being imported, the genetic diversity of potatos in Peru has recently plunged, as the Peruvian farmers elect to raise only those few varieties which best please northern markets. Each individual farmer chooses the genetic makeup which he knows will be most competitive -- and so all farmers choose genetically similar potatos.
It's like the gov't spying on your mail by opening them all in the post office. And while yes, they can do this, it requires a court order and probably cause to do so (someone back me up, I'm not actually certain of this fact).
Here's your backup. Amendment IV of the Constitution of the USA:
[...]no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Of course, that may not be in force due to the PATRIOT act, which I gather rather extended the circumstances under which wiretaps could be performed.
For what I think is the source of the fourfold player type thing (explore, socialize, kill, achieve), see this 1996 article by Richard Bartle [brandeis.edu], a mud pioneer.
FYI, in 1987 or so, TSR came out with the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, which explicated a three-fold typology of gamers, in its DM section. They were (approx.) "hack-n-slasher", "dectective" and "role player". Not online-specific, but obviously similar and for an obviously similar purpose.
This is no different than a more thorough/convenient parent-teacher conference.
Oh, really? That shows how little you know. You clearly have never been to a parent-teacher conference. It is precisely the opposite of a "more thorough/convenient" conference. It eliminates all pedagogical context from the communication with the parent, thereby leaving it ripe for misunderstanding and miscommunication.
I'm shocked at how many/.rs actually believe in grades. That's like believing that if the fuel gauge on your car always reads empty regardless of how much fuel you put in it must be because your gas tank is never full. Grades are but an indicator light, a massively condensed index of information, a short-hand for someone's performance. They tell you very, very little.
In a proper parent-teacher conference, things come up like "I have to give your Johnny an A because his work is so much better than his peers', but he clearly is not working up to his potential, and he's spending a lot of time cutting up in class." Or "Yes, Susie is only getting a C in this class, but for someone who transfered in and didn't have the prerequisite, she's doing a great job, and considering how well she's managed so far, I expect she'll be at the top of the class by semester's end." Or, "Yes, Timmy is only getting a B in my class. My class is very hard, and I don't grade as lightly as the other teachers here. In my class, that's a good grade."
In this system, all you get to see is a letter grade. The parents have no context to judge what it means. Basically it's a recipe for parents to leap to all sorts of erroneous conclusions.
I strongly suggest that all you "rah, grades mean something absolute" slashdotters go get your consciousness raised. One of the best books for this is out of print Wad-Ja-Get? the Grading Game in American Education, which
covers the history and theory of grades in American education, including information about academic studies of the rigorousness (or rather, lack there of) of grades.
Dunno about NZ, but here in the USA, Prodigy Services Co lost common carrier status in 1995 as a result of Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy Services Co because they actively monitored and censored postings.
Do you really mean "free (as in speech) exchange of ideas" or free (as in beer) music.
It is the university's responsibility to protect the former, but discourage the latter. Let's try not to confuse the two.
Really? While I do understand that what is being prosecuted is students sharing music for entertainment, music is a field of academic study.
When I took composition classes in college, back in 1990 or so, the professor had CDs put on reserve for the students to check out for in-library use. How would you like, in addition to buying textbooks for a class, having to buy 10 CDs (some, the extra-pricey historical music CDs) just to listen to one track on each? The alternative back then was to have to go into the library during open hours, and hope there was a CD player free, and no one else from the class was using the CD then. It was, frankly a pain in the ass.
The fact is, for many music classes (also historical dance classes) filesharing would be an utter godsend.
Currently, I am an amateur historical music scholar (programmer is my day job) directing a "Historically Informed Performance" (term of art among music history geeks) group of amateurs. The ethical and logistical considerations stay my hand, but I would dearly love to be able to fileshare example pieces from professional recordings with the musicians in my group. Many of them -- especially the college students -- aren't willing to shell out $20 bucks to listen to one track, nor to spend $25+ for tickets to hear a concert. I keep trying to convince them they need to hear what other scholars in the field are doing, that they need to be exposed to the work of the professionals, but it's an uphill battle. And frankly, I'm hesitant to loan my CDs out. We've tried "listening parties", where we get together to listent to and discuss professional work, but they haven't been too successful, because either we have to take time out of our regularly scheduled rehearsals, or somehow come up with times we can all meet outside of rehearsals, and the logistics rarely work out. Yet most of my band members work in IT or are at universities, have access to systems with a lot of bandwidth...
Here's a question that I'm mulling over as a result of reading the synopsis of this article. With all the literary and cinematic works that have been made which deal with a Big Brother-like state [for lack of a shorter term], why is it that the governments of the world are still able to move in the directions outlined in those works? It seems like no matter how embedded in our culture the idea that certain traits of governments are bad and that we must rally against them, these traits continue to crop up. Consider this, has the U.S. become more or less like the vision of 1984 since publication?
I have been thinking about that quite a bit, lately, in part because I am reading Social Justice in Islam by Qutb (see this Salon article for why).
It seems to me the answer -- and a very overlooked and under-appreciated answer it is -- is that totalitarianism is massively seductive, even to the average man on the street.
Those of us who self-conceive as outsiders -- whether because of ethnicity, religion, sexuality, eccentricity, etc. -- we look to conformism as an obvious threat. But to people who self-conceive as "normal", who take identity and comfort from their "averageness", who enjoy majority privilege and a sense of entitlement, conformity looks comforting and comfortable.
Totalitarianism is, really, the ultimate dream of conformity -- state imposed, pushishable-by-death conformity. That idea has considerable appeal to people who consider themselves safely within the mainstream. Not only is it not any skin off their nose if a few statistical outliers get trampled, they see it as a relief -- whether emotional or finanacial.
Totalitarianism is inevitably sold as a panacea. Totalitarian movements sell themselves by presenting a vision of how, if everyone just co-operated, transcended their differences, were willing to submit themselves to a little bit of hardship and sacrifice, they could improve the Commonweath -- to build heaven on earth. If we all just pulled together, we could feed all the hungry, eliminate crime, cure disease, and be ensured a pleasant afterlife appropriate deity.
That's a seductive vision. It's even more seductive to people who have an unconsidered conviction that they, being good, loyal citizens doing their part for the the common good, would not be the people who would have to make significant sacrifices. Indeed someone who thinks they are an "average guy" looks at those people who object to going along with the totalitarian regime and resents bitterly that he is going to be deprived of the good life by some weirdo going on about a right to privacy.
Not only is it a good computer cracking movie, the soundtrack is BRILLIANT. Musically speaking, some very unusual decisions were made about how and what to communicate via the accompaniment, and those decisions had fantastic results. An absolute joy to listen to on CD, too, as well as being a phenomenal contribution to the plot of the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Upto $15/hr!? Yeah, you're not getting rich.
The commonly given reason for freelancing instead of going through an agency is that you make more per hour freelancing. Well, I did agency (temping) tech support and started at $16/hr.
Why, yes, yes you can! Says here, hmmm, where you are, looks like a couple of week after they can lay the trunk across the ice bridge between the 4th and 5th levels of hell. HTH, HAND! :)
The Horror of Spam, a Usenet classic.
Who all looked at the subject and thought, "Gee, I wonder how postgresql does against Oracle?"
OK, and who all thought, "How do you get a db into a dress??"
No. But if the ice cream vendor refused to sell to them or refused to let them into the building because they were allergic, they could sue.
That is the proper analogy to setting up a website that refuses to serve blind people.... and, since no one has mentioned it, those with poor vision, a much, much larger population, as all those baby boomers hit later middle age and start needing reading glasses.
No. The basic premise is that businesses above a certain size don't get to pick and choose whom they do business with by any criteria except those which directly pertain to the transaction (customer's credit-worthiness, e.g.).
I have come to the view that this is actually a necessary principle for a capitalistic democracy/republic to hold, similar in nature to requiring restraints upon the government to legislate (e.g. the US Bill of Rights), if that society is to thrive. Not only is it necessary for all peoples to be protected from the tyranny of the majority in legislative matters, so ethnic or religious minorities don't get voted into gulags and concentration camps, it is also necessary that all people's guaranteed access to the market must be protected from the tyranny of the majority in economic matters.
Otherwise, taking the notion of "you get to discriminate against whom you like" to its logical conclusion, the majority can decide they don't like selling food, fertilizer, or land to a minority, and starve them to death. Or keep them in a state of thralldom through enforced crushing poverty, which is what has essentially happened to black people in the US for generations.
Gods, this is so stupid, I don't know where to start. First and foremost, by default it should be up to the two parties involved in commerce to decide what level of anonymity or identity they are willing to treat under. If I am comfortable buying something from someone anonymous and untrackable, as I have done many times in my life, that's my prerogative. If a seller says they will only treat with me anonymously and I don't like that, I don't have to buy from them.
My objection is to being forced to do business one way or the other. It would be just as bad to be forced to have always anonymous business as it would to have never anonymous business.
And for those of you dimwits who can't imagine a legitimate use one might have for anonymous commerce, I suggest you look into the history of birthcontrol and sex ed. The government has a nasty habit of being coopted by moralists who criminalize vending medicines, medical devices and information that they disapprove of.
Uh, dude? That's how I type (only with more than three fingers :) because I never took a typing class, but studied piano since the age of 5. Until I was about 30, it worked great for me, too. Then the tendonitis in my elbows kicked in. CTS is not the only RSI.
Typing like a pianist sounds like a splendid idea, right up to the point you find out how many pianists have RSIs! It is the occupational hazzard for professional musicians, to the point that sports medicine clinics are increasingly catering to musicians who have badly wacked their bodies in pursuit of their careers. I personally know a scary number of musicians who have crippled themselves playing.
So, there I was, with some other technologist acquaintances, and I made passing referrence to being "geeks". One archly sniffed and said, "You bite the heads off live chickens?" To which I replied, of course, "Don't be silly; these days we bite heads off live users."
If he was, he wasn't terribly successful. In the Meditations, "God willed it that way" is what follows right after "Cogito, ergo sum". Specifically, Descartes argues
Which is a pretty crummy argument, logically speaking. It boils down to "I just know God wouldn't do that to us. Mneh." There doesn't seem (to my eye) to be any argument in the Meditations that it is possible to know whether we are philosophers or butterflies, save that rests on the presumption of the knowledge of God (and a very particular conception of "God", too).
Irrelevant, actually. I listed those three items as purposes, not outcomes. As to whether those purposes are attained is obviously contingent upon many things. Furthermore, they are the purposes as to why someone would choose them for themselves, not why a parent would choose them for their child.
Yes, being impelled to continue is bad.I don't know if you're implying here that a parent ordering their child to continue doing something teaches that child to follow through. I have not found that to be true. Quite the opposite. I find it quite shocking how many gifted young people I know who are convinced that "If I weren't made to do it, I wouldn't be able to stick it out" about anything that has to do with self-improvement. Particularly distressing was the seminar at MIT in which I heard a bunch of undergrads express that opinion of themselves.
Surely teaching a child how to persevere is a vital part of their upbringing. I am quite sure I don't know how to do it. But I am also quite sure that forcing a child teaches the child to rely on being forced. It makes children lazy!
At any rate, yes, burn out is a big problem, especially among those whose experience of an activity -- any activity -- is as of a forced march!
Agreed. Of course, I don't consider the problem to be the enrichment activities such as may be lumped under "after school activities"; I consider the problem to be the loads of busywork homework they load kids down with.
Agreed. The other problem I would have were I a child now, with much of the way children's lives are organized today, is that children are required to spend all their time in herds. I am an introverted person, and need quiet solitude to think, compose, write, reflect, etc. I do better learning one-on-one or in small groups. So many enrichment activities -- and all classroom time -- happen in big groups. I studied music one-on-one with a private instructor; I studied art the same way.
No, not in my experience. Those parents I know who seem to always be running around to their kids' activities don't have that attitude at all. They seem to be trying to keep up with the kids -- who seem quite able to say "I don't want to be in that activity".
Of course, one of the issues here is that complaining about the detrimental effects of too many activities gives parents who don't want to support their kids a handy out. They can claim, to themselves if no one else, that they're doing their kids a favor by insisting on the kid not doing activities.
You miss my point. Nobody disagrees with that. We all agree here on what is good vs. bad. The thing I'm wondering is: Which is happening? Is it the parents who are making those decisions? I'm cynical enough to wonder if it might not, instead, be the case that the kids take it on happily themselves, and the people going on about how awful it is for parents to make kids take all that stuff on are... other parents.
After all, it's a common sport for parents who don't support their kids to sneer at parents who do as "pushy". It's not to say there aren't pushy parents, just that there's a hell of a lot of insecure parents who are happy to slander another parent just to make themselves feel better about what they are or aren't providing to their own kids. "Isn't it terrible what Mrs. Jones is doing to little Janey making her take all those ballet classes and chess lessons. What a wonderful parent I am for sparing my child those opportun^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpressures"
When I hear someone say "Oh! Oh! Think of the children!" my cynicism gets turned up to 11.
They don't? I thought their purpose was
I'm completely willing to believe I'm badly out of the loop, but aren't those things kids do because they enjoy them? I kept as heavy a performing arts schedule as I could manage, when I was a kid (the limiting factor was my mother's willingness/ability to schlep me around to places.)
Guess what? Until very recently, I kept as heavy a performing arts schedule as I could manage, as an adult. I enjoyed it.
I find all this handwringing about kids' heavy activity levels to be somewhat boggling. As much as I did, it still felt to me like I was kept in a state of enforced boredom; I enjoyed what activities I did get to do mightily, but until HS, they never felt like close to enough.
I grasp that too much of a good thing is not a good thing. But it seems that it's adults who are wailing and gnashing their teeth over kids schedules, not the kids. Or at least, far less frequently the kids. Maybe I'm way off base, but I can't help wondering if it's just that there's a lot of adults who are jealous of what kids get to do, and have a bad case of Sour Grapes.
Are you referring to film versions of these or the original writing? I ask because I'd be interested to learn if there was a film of A Wrinkle in Time and if it were any good.
However, if you're referring to the books, AFAIK, Watership Down was not written for children. Weighing in at nearly 1000 pages (paperback), and having some, what is the ephemism? oh, "explicit" violence (the account of the Sandleford Warren is pretty damn gruesome), it was always intended for adult readers. That is not to say it is inappropriate for children. Those children who are up to reading 1000 page allegorical novels about political systems, who don't still get nightmares, are in for a real treat. I read it at the age of about 13, and thought it the single most thrilling thing I'd ever read; I still think it's one of the most thrilling things I've ever read. I strongly recommend this book to GT kids; if you can make it through the first 60 pages, the book will sweep you up and carry you the rest of the way.
Allow me to enlighten you.
The small business people being discussed are people who wouldn't know Dreamweaver from a hole in the ground, and whose time -- that is the time it would take them to learn what it is -- is extremely precious in a purely financial sense.
They do not know what they are shopping for in the first place -- not knowing the difference between a domain name registrar and a hosting company and a web design house, for instance -- much less how to go about shopping around for them. How the hell should they know how many [k|M|G]b of storage a month they need? Or what bandwidth would be the best use of their money? Or what features they might want? How should they know whether they need the $20/mo account with static pages or the $200/mo account with php/mysql/etc, when they have no idea what these things are or why -- or how -- they'd use them.
Sure, they could learn all this. But it takes time and effort which your typical small business really doesn't have to invest. They no more want to implement their own web presence than they want to implement their own plumbing.
From the point of view of a small business, hiring someone to develop -- and subsequently maintain -- their web presence is like installing a shunt directly into their bank accounts. Being non-techies, they have no idea how to manage a technical contractor nor their technical contracting expenses, even those as humble as a high school student slinging some HTML on a summer vacation, as some idiot proposed.
The fact of the matter is that unless you know what you're doing -- and it is precisely people who don't know what they're doing when it comes to the web that we are discussing -- getting your small business on line can be very expensive and time consuming. It can take your company to the cleaners.
The commonest way that small businesses -- and the geeks that work for them -- screw this one up is that the business hires someone to "make a web site for them", and the geek obligingly puts together some static web pages, buys them a domain, and parks the pages there. The geek never mentions maintainability, and the small business never thinks to ask.
And the next thing you know, the small business has to pay a specialist every time they want to change a price on the web site.
Another thing the small business never thinks to ask about is backups. Or content versioning.
All these things start nickle-and-diming the business to death. That is why prudent small businesses are wicked leery of moving on to the web. And why this company is going to do well: they're basically providing small businesses with a Content Management System. They won't need specialists to maintain their pages for them, and their costs will be strictly controlled.
> OSCOM 3 will be held at Harvard University
May 28th-30th.
Heh. Welcome to the world of "Historically Informed Performance", as we music/dance/theater history nuts call it. That's where you put on a concert of say, Handel, using only the varieties and forms of instruments available in Handel's day.
I can see it now, "A MOMA Retrospective: The Dawn of Digital Art, 1970-2010. On historically authentic servers and clients, meticulously reconstructed by digital art historians! For a limited time only!"
It turns out there is a good scientific answer why not. Before explaining it, I'd like to state for the record that I am pro-progress; the idea of voluntary eugenics isn't a problem for me -- except for this niggling technical detail.
The reason that allowing each individual set of parents to decide on the genetic disposition of their children is bad is that
The most famous example of Why Monocrops Are Bad is the Great Potato Famine of Ireland. Potatos had become the staple crop (i.e. what everyone ate) of Ireland, but they're not a native species. All the potatos plants of Ireland were decended from fewer than a dozen potato plants imported from Peru. Because the millions of potatos plants descended from those initial imports all shared the same extremely small genetic pool, they shared the same weeknesses. A disease came along (actually a fungus, IIRC) which none of them were resistant too. The plants all died, and then the people relying upon those plants for food started dieing -- millions of them.
And lest you think this is a function of the plants being imported, the genetic diversity of potatos in Peru has recently plunged, as the Peruvian farmers elect to raise only those few varieties which best please northern markets. Each individual farmer chooses the genetic makeup which he knows will be most competitive -- and so all farmers choose genetically similar potatos.
Now imagine that happening with humans...
Here's your backup. Amendment IV of the Constitution of the USA:
Of course, that may not be in force due to the PATRIOT act, which I gather rather extended the circumstances under which wiretaps could be performed.
FYI, in 1987 or so, TSR came out with the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, which explicated a three-fold typology of gamers, in its DM section. They were (approx.) "hack-n-slasher", "dectective" and "role player". Not online-specific, but obviously similar and for an obviously similar purpose.
Yeah, the "grey goo" idea is like an intellectual amoeba, spreading ever more rapidly, growing geometrically to engulf everything in its path....
Oh, really? That shows how little you know. You clearly have never been to a parent-teacher conference. It is precisely the opposite of a "more thorough/convenient" conference. It eliminates all pedagogical context from the communication with the parent, thereby leaving it ripe for misunderstanding and miscommunication.
I'm shocked at how many /.rs actually believe in grades. That's like believing that if the fuel gauge on your car always reads empty regardless of how much fuel you put in it must be because your gas tank is never full. Grades are but an indicator light, a massively condensed index of information, a short-hand for someone's performance. They tell you very, very little.
In a proper parent-teacher conference, things come up like "I have to give your Johnny an A because his work is so much better than his peers', but he clearly is not working up to his potential, and he's spending a lot of time cutting up in class." Or "Yes, Susie is only getting a C in this class, but for someone who transfered in and didn't have the prerequisite, she's doing a great job, and considering how well she's managed so far, I expect she'll be at the top of the class by semester's end." Or, "Yes, Timmy is only getting a B in my class. My class is very hard, and I don't grade as lightly as the other teachers here. In my class, that's a good grade."
In this system, all you get to see is a letter grade. The parents have no context to judge what it means. Basically it's a recipe for parents to leap to all sorts of erroneous conclusions.
I strongly suggest that all you "rah, grades mean something absolute" slashdotters go get your consciousness raised. One of the best books for this is out of print Wad-Ja-Get? the Grading Game in American Education, which covers the history and theory of grades in American education, including information about academic studies of the rigorousness (or rather, lack there of) of grades.
Dunno about NZ, but here in the USA, Prodigy Services Co lost common carrier status in 1995 as a result of Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy Services Co because they actively monitored and censored postings.
Really? While I do understand that what is being prosecuted is students sharing music for entertainment, music is a field of academic study.
When I took composition classes in college, back in 1990 or so, the professor had CDs put on reserve for the students to check out for in-library use. How would you like, in addition to buying textbooks for a class, having to buy 10 CDs (some, the extra-pricey historical music CDs) just to listen to one track on each? The alternative back then was to have to go into the library during open hours, and hope there was a CD player free, and no one else from the class was using the CD then. It was, frankly a pain in the ass.
The fact is, for many music classes (also historical dance classes) filesharing would be an utter godsend.
Currently, I am an amateur historical music scholar (programmer is my day job) directing a "Historically Informed Performance" (term of art among music history geeks) group of amateurs. The ethical and logistical considerations stay my hand, but I would dearly love to be able to fileshare example pieces from professional recordings with the musicians in my group. Many of them -- especially the college students -- aren't willing to shell out $20 bucks to listen to one track, nor to spend $25+ for tickets to hear a concert. I keep trying to convince them they need to hear what other scholars in the field are doing, that they need to be exposed to the work of the professionals, but it's an uphill battle. And frankly, I'm hesitant to loan my CDs out. We've tried "listening parties", where we get together to listent to and discuss professional work, but they haven't been too successful, because either we have to take time out of our regularly scheduled rehearsals, or somehow come up with times we can all meet outside of rehearsals, and the logistics rarely work out. Yet most of my band members work in IT or are at universities, have access to systems with a lot of bandwidth...
I have been thinking about that quite a bit, lately, in part because I am reading Social Justice in Islam by Qutb (see this Salon article for why).
It seems to me the answer -- and a very overlooked and under-appreciated answer it is -- is that totalitarianism is massively seductive, even to the average man on the street.
Those of us who self-conceive as outsiders -- whether because of ethnicity, religion, sexuality, eccentricity, etc. -- we look to conformism as an obvious threat. But to people who self-conceive as "normal", who take identity and comfort from their "averageness", who enjoy majority privilege and a sense of entitlement, conformity looks comforting and comfortable.
Totalitarianism is, really, the ultimate dream of conformity -- state imposed, pushishable-by-death conformity. That idea has considerable appeal to people who consider themselves safely within the mainstream. Not only is it not any skin off their nose if a few statistical outliers get trampled, they see it as a relief -- whether emotional or finanacial.
Totalitarianism is inevitably sold as a panacea. Totalitarian movements sell themselves by presenting a vision of how, if everyone just co-operated, transcended their differences, were willing to submit themselves to a little bit of hardship and sacrifice, they could improve the Commonweath -- to build heaven on earth. If we all just pulled together, we could feed all the hungry, eliminate crime, cure disease, and be ensured a pleasant afterlife appropriate deity.
That's a seductive vision. It's even more seductive to people who have an unconsidered conviction that they, being good, loyal citizens doing their part for the the common good, would not be the people who would have to make significant sacrifices. Indeed someone who thinks they are an "average guy" looks at those people who object to going along with the totalitarian regime and resents bitterly that he is going to be deprived of the good life by some weirdo going on about a right to privacy.
Not only is it a good computer cracking movie, the soundtrack is BRILLIANT. Musically speaking, some very unusual decisions were made about how and what to communicate via the accompaniment, and those decisions had fantastic results. An absolute joy to listen to on CD, too, as well as being a phenomenal contribution to the plot of the movie.