While the word "addiction" has completely valid clinical meaning, it is frequently appropriated to dismiss/disparage/condemn people who are to enthusiastic about something, and not cynical and disengaged and aloof -- not *cool* -- enough.
It serves among adults the sampe purpose as the term "geek" does in the school yard. Too interested in playing in the school band? "Band geek." Too interested in talking to playing MUDs? "Addicted to the internet."
There's a whopping cult of cynicism in the US. Being enthusiastic, excited, earnest, interested transgresses against this cult. Being "cool" means being cynical, aloof, disinterested, etc. If you don't conform to this cult of cynicism, refuse to behave "cool", the name-calling starts.
Disagree? Well, why is it in these diatribes (however gently put) as to how addictive the Internet is, people seem to feel free to invoke "balance" --
Many people do have trouble from
time to time balancing e-mail, IM, gaming, coding, IRC-chatting, arguing, shopping, trading, even moderating, with the demands and balance of real life.
-- but it only applies to to people who use the net "too much". If these pundits really cared about balance where are the gently put expressions of "concern" about people who don't get enough internet? About people who are "phobic" and avoid the net? Why aren't there comments of concern about such people's psychological well being?
Instead, someone who avoids the net is indulged as a reasonable person who perhaps is a touch eccentric, or more likely seen as being more pure and aloof from a crass modern lifestyle.
No, "balance" is not the issue.
This still just boils down to grown-up name-calling.
You know what? Life can really stink in the US. Living in a culture in which you are never supposed to really be emotionally invested in anything except work and family is really soul-sucking. It should come as no surprize that if someone finds something the slightest bit fun, something that is interesting and engaging, something that lets them feel the slightest sense of success or getting something accomplished -- on-line or off! --it will really hit home. On-line, there's no one calling you a geek, or giving you dirty looks, for not being "cool enough", so, duh, of course people turn to the net to vent their enthusiasm.
Jesus Fucking Christ, I don't believe this. There is not one post yet which points out that in the corporate environment, EMAIL CLIENTS ARE TOYS NOT TOOLS.
Of course workers are getting bogged down in email. They're using Outlook for heaven's sake, or Netscape or Eudora or Notes. These products are the most unspeakably half-assed crap -- I have used all of them extensively, and know whereof I speak -- and it's impossible to manage email in them.
How do they suck? Oh, let me count the ways:
Anything which does formatting (HTML email, etc.) takes longer to render, so you have to pause for that much longer on every message. It's infintessimal on a single message, but it adds up fast when you have 100 messages a day.
The filtering on those products is unforgivably lame. To the extent they manage to filter, they then are helpless to cope with filtered mail.
Speaking of rendering time: they go to all that effort to have snazzy window-y GUIs, and then don't put the power to, say, color code on a filter basis into the hands of the user. Brilliant.
They have no flexibility of identity, which is one part of the equation of functional corporate email. It is imperative that the user be able to
specify both Reply-to and From fields in his out going message. If Joe Rep is one of the several people receiving the emails sent to "moreInfo@somecompany.com", he must be able to send email From, or at least Reply-to "moreInfo@somecompany.com".
The concept of filtering as implemented in those packages is the paradigm of paper in cabinets. WHAT THE HELL? It should be possible to put one message in multiple "mailboxes", but only have one actual copy stored -- and the client should tell you where the multiple copies are, and behave sanely if you delete one.
There is no, not one, no, not any of these products with any provision, whatsoever, of the timely retirement of email into archives. Some permit something like manually saving things to archives, but none let you say "this folder, move read messages into that archive after two months". So these email clients are completely unscalable through time. After you have used one for a year, you're drowning in relics, which you want to save but are in your way. The idea that anyone would routinely throw away email is absurd. Diskspace is dirt cheap, there is no excuse. A sane method of archiving is vital -- a method which allows you to "put away" things you're not using, but take them down when they are needed again.
I could (and someday will) go on and on and on about how worthless the tools corporate users are expected to use. But it's not just the mail clients! If you want users to not spam everyone, have a viable place for them to send that info: set up lists and boards sanely, so people use them. Make it easy for people to be added or removed from lists. Have policies in place to handle contractors and temps; it is not sane to expect all important instructions to go over email lists which your temps aren't on, and expect for your temps to know what to do. Duh.
Have aliases or lists for interfacing with the public, so that outsiders don't have to know the name of the relevant person they should contact. "Sales@yourcompany.com" (for example) should go to the right group of people, and every time they respond to one of those emails, everyone else in that group should be notified. Duh.
And, Duh, their email client should prominently clue them into the fact the email they are responding to is not to them personally, but to the "sales" alias.
It all boils down to the fact that corporate email systems -- their configurations from a usability standpoint, and their god-awful clients -- are at best children's toys, not professional tools for getting real work done.
There is no product up to that description, frankly. Meanwhile, we geeks will continue using terminal-based solutions. Some swear by emacs, some by pine. Me, I have a homebrew concoction of nmh, procmail, several bzillion little shell scripts, and my own domain (so I can have all the email addresses I ever want). It's not even close to adequate, but it's so far in advance of corporate toys it's pathetic.
I know that lots of people sneer at geek's tendency to try to solve human problems with technological solutions, but DAMN, this is precisely the kind of problem to be solved technologically.
In any case, how would you go about teaching humility? By pointing out that it is possible?
Yes. Rather.
I have to make them learn by example.
Your failure to use the rhetoric correctly is telling. The expression is "teach by example". There is no such thing as "learn by example"; the reciprocal concept is to "learn from example". Teaching by example means exemplifying what you want your students to learn; being the example. That is to say: one teaches humility by being humble, or not at all. It is generally how I understand Jesus and Mother Theresa to have gone about it -- but no doubt you have a much superior methodology they would have benefitted to know.
Perhaps you mean "make an example of"? That's the practice of abusing one person in the hopes it will intimidate many others.
Goddamn, I remember the good ole days of the Net, before the stinking web and its stinking crass commercialism invaded this golden land of cyberspace -- back when there was actually CONTENT, by goddess, on alt.sex.bondage -- and people made and shared porn from the goodness of their gonads, without any thought of profit.
Oh, this is filth all right -- FILTY LUCRE! Yahoo should be ashamed, contributing to the perversion of the Net like that.
There is only one response! I call on/.ers to rise up (as it were) and contribute OPEN SOURCE PR0N for the good of humanity!
All MIT students have 24/7 computer access
on
Open Courses at MIT
·
· Score: 2
Students with computers at home (i.e., financially stable students) will have access at all times, while others (minorities, etc) will not
MIT provides all students with round-the-clock computer access on high-quality UNIX workstations. The rest of your post is not worth commenting on.
The majority of kids don't learn to treat each other that way from their parents. They often do get the impression that it's OK with adults to do so, after they do it and don't get in trouble.
No, a very few kids learn it from their parents... but then they "teach" it to their peers, and that's where most kids "learn to treat each other that way".
Violence behaves like a contagion, and we know virulence varies with population density. Take one kid who is getting knocked around at home, and lock 19 other kids in with him, and soon you have 20 violent, acting-out kids.
While it would be nice to "blame" the parents of the "patient zero" kid, it doesn't actually solve anything. You can't prevent crazy, sick people from having kids, and you can't prevent people with kids from getting crazy or sick. There will always be kids in any school system who are "carriers" for violence.
The way to ameliorate this problem is simple: reduce the population density of kids. Don't put them in large groups. The violence won't spread as rapidly, and may die out before it becomes endemic.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for telling the parents who let their kids become absuive what crappy human beings they are -- "BAD PARENT. NO BISCUIT." -- and would gladly string up someone who abuses their own kid.
But I'm far more intrigued by ways to actually reduce human suffering. Pointing fingers is, as emotionally satisfying as it may be, not really a substitute for logical problem solving. This is precisely one of those cases where changing the functioning of the system can have dramatic "tipping point" effects, and it has nothing to do with who is at fault.
Myself, I was noticing the background was very da Vinci-esque, and was thinking late 15th, but willing to grant maybe mid-15th, because the style of illustrating the rocks in the foreground was not sufficiently naturalistic. I was being conservative: 1449 minus 150 equals 1299, or the last moments of the 13th century.
YKYBITSCATLW! I spend a-lot-but-not-enough time looking at early 13th century pictoral evidence of/for women's clothing. If all -- if any 13th century illuminations were as naturalistic and clear as this one, my life would be much, much easier. I confess my first thought was "13th century? Bah! You can tell what she's wearing! I wish!"
Now, as a med/ren-geek myself, I must take issue with your tone in:
This
scheme was so engrained that even the greatest artists always followed it slavishly.
Please! They had a different, but not wholly unfathomable aesthetic. They found symmetry beautiful, and it is not merely in their paintings this appears. We find it, for instance, in their dance choreographies: what is done to the left is then done to the right. It was an expression of order and "mesura" (measure, balance, harmony).
Furthermore, the positioning of people (and, interestingly, buildings) in Italian (at least) Ren painting had all sorts of complex symbolism which was evident to contemporary viewers, but not to the naive modern viewer. When we moderns look at a painting, we expect to look into a window; we expect to look at the figures of a painting. But the contemporaries of da Vinci read paintings. They expected them not merely to be beautiful, but to have meaning, to, perhaps, tell a story, or express and opinion. When you think about it, they were much more semiotically aware.
So to criticise the composition of an early Ren painting by the standards of a Baroque composition, is like criticising a work of prose fiction for not rhyming and having iambic pentameter. That's not what it's supposed to do, not how it's supposed to work, never what it was intended for. It misses the point.
I would be willing to pay $0.50 per month to post on Slashdot and stay active in the
community, but I would never pay money to read it.
But Slashdot isn't Salon -- which is why I read both. I read Slashdot to participate; I read Salon to be entertained.
Yes, Salon has discussion fora, but I find them lame. What I am willing to pay for is a really good daily magazine.
Would I pay to post on Slashdot? No. Well, not unless CmdrTaco lifts the karma cap.
Unfortunately, the things which make/. cool would be killed if there were barriers to entry. (Actually, I do belong to a discussion forum with barriers to entry, and it is cool in a very different way.)/. wouldn't be/. if, for instance, the scientists who are the focus of a story couldn't find out about the ruckus here and wade in to the discussion. That sort of things happens, and it can't happen when one must pay to participate.
How does this work? That's easy. My current client is a famous research company which sells it's reports on a subscription basis (for big, big bucks) and delivers primarily via the web these days. And they're wildly successful (as in "in the black") doing this.
The thing that you're missing is that Salon's subscription service will also have subscriber-only content. Which is important. And makes it much more what my client does.
Simply put, it is in the best interests of subscribers not to share proprietary info with all their friends. It's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation simple enough even your average luser gets it. Subscribers want to continue receiving very high quality content. They know that if that content isn't profitable it goes away.
Here's the big crucial clue everyone has missed so far: there is a difference between buying a virtual good -- like an e-book -- and subscribing to a a virtual service.
If you can rip off an e-book, and yeah, more or less you come out ahead. You got what you want. Authors rant about how if you don't pay for the one you want now, they won't be able to afford to make the next one. But, as everyone knows, that's a crap shoot. Just because an author wrote a book you liked doesn't mean you will necessarily care about the next book. Authors too numerous to mention have let their readers down on sequels. So the market is not terribly responsive to their pleas.
But a subscription is a relationship. You front your money with the belief that you will regularly get high quality content. If you don't think you will get sufficiently good content over the life of your subscription, you don't subscribe. And because it is a relationship, the other side can pull the plug if you cheat. But even more importantly, it is in your best interest to make sure that the company fulfilling the other end of your subscription-contract is still around to do so!
If you deprive the company with whom you have a subscription-contract of paying customers, they are going to stiff you the content you expect to get. Real simple.
Unlike with stand-alone good, in a subscription model, the seller has hostages.
Sure, there will be people who rip off a small number of articles. At my afforementioned client corp., they chalk such things up to good publicity, and just don't sweat it.
As far as security goes, the answer is to not have rigorous security. Tell people what the rules are, and if them break them, kill their accounts, no refund. If one name/password pair were to show massive simultaneous usage to multiple diverse IPs, don't you think they'd pull the plug?
I'm a contractor. I've had something like 50 to 60 clients in the last 9.75 years, on jobs ranging from one day to 8 mos. I consider it "anthropological research."
Why on earth does this article pit "engineers" against "people"?
Where do they get off making no mention of the managers who refuse to pay for real QA? Who micromanage their designers? Who insist "make it blue"?
Why is there no mention of designers who seem never to have heard the adage "form follows function"?
I confess more than a little irritation that "engineers" are taking the rap for their PHBs, for the airheads in marketting who care more about releasing a product at the right moment than whether that product is ready for prime time, for designers who care more that there's a cohesive colorscheme than that it presents the user with a compelling metaphor.
It has never been my experience that it was the techs on a project who wanted to get the project done faster rather than better. 99 times out of 100, management has to pry the techs' fingers from the code ("No, really, code freezes NOW.") Similarly, it's not the techs saying "gee, why waste the money on real QA specialists."
In my experience, coders have immense respect for usability (even those who don't know how to make it themselves) and robustness, but are never taken seriously when they say "no, that's not how we should be doing it; it would be better if...". To blame them as a class for the failures in robustness and usability of their code is salt in the wound.
Learning that stuff is much easier when you're very young (just like learning new languages is). It's boring, but
without that you're handicapped latter on.
Do you actually have evidence for that, or is it one of those "everybody knows" sorts of things?
And, frankly, is the the issue even relevant to whether it should be taught to kids in schools?
Seriously, when I was a kid (elementary school, jr high) I did a lot of peer-tutoring in math, because I witnessed for myself how damaging most math classes were to my peers' mathematical intuitions (which in young kids starts out pretty good). I seriously mean to say that the majority of those classes were egregiously counterproductive, ingraining in kids terrible habits of mind and attitudes about the behaviour of abstracts, which greatly interfered with their ability to pursue real mathematics.
I really don't think that, even if arithmetic is more easily learned when very young, we can trust the classroom to impart that skill without savaging all but the brightest students' facility for true mathematical abstraction.
Interesting. There was a very similar experiement performed with reading, many years ago.
IIRC, the parameters were a class of kids was not taught to read until ~4th grade. After about 9 weeks of instruction, these kids were vastly out-performing the control group which had received standard reading instruction from kindergarten on.
Everything you write presupposes an independent and uncompromised State, and all markets being vital, option-rich free markets. But if a corporation can buy governmental power -- for instance, through bribing senators or judges, or through kingmaking, or getting state-sponsored monopolies -- than the State becomes a puppet of Corporations. And if markets are ruled de-facto monopolies or the major players in them price-fix, then the Corporation can become a kind of de-facto government.
And those are precisely the problems which so many anti-Corporatists perceive. Schooling is a good example: there are many places where the supply of "seats" in private schools is less than the demand, and being able to get into a private school at all is literally a crap shoot (see the whole Charter School issue in MA).
While I am completely behind homeschooling, and advocate it 100%, don't get me wrong -- saying "there's homeschooling as an alternative to the lack of reasonable choices in private schools" is precisely like saying "if you don't like the business practices of the two grocery stores in your town, grow your own food." There's a lot of merit to it -- but it in no way addresses the problems of the market.
This sort of technology can lead to mind controlled machines. In a decade or two, it could be possible for you to look
up the definition for a word on m-w.com while simultaneoulsy carrying on a conversation, and the other person
wouldn't ever know that you needed to look the word up.
Er, no. This is about muscular nerves. Picking out eight myoelectrical signals through (several?) cm of meat is no mean feat, but distinguishing what's going on in millions of ganglia through a skull? And that's merely considering the scale difference; I dimly recall the idea that muscular nerves were qualitatively different than the ones which we think with.
We can't change whether the law is implemented, but be can change how it is implemented. So write to the FCC to demand they institute a policy whereby:
Any filtering software used to compy with the law MUST release to public review the list of censored sites. "Public" MUST mean posted to the web (and not self-censored!) and available for free upon demand in hard copy.
Any filtering software company MUST have and conform to an appeal process so that wrongfully censored sites have a process of appeal and redress. This appeal process MUST presume the filtering software is in error and the burden of proof MUST be upon the filtering software company.
Any filtering software company which is found in a court of law to have censored web sites unethically, such as censoring the pages of its competitors or of political opinions its owners disagree with, MUST BE SUBJECT TO UNLIMITED PUNITIVE DAMAGES. There must be restraints on the almost unlimited power being given to these corporations.
If there is going to be a private industry censoring what Americans can read in their libraries, then there'd better be checks and balances. We can take advantage of this situation to force filtering software companies to be more ethical and responsible.
As for this particular kid's problem... what the hell was he doing signing up for classes before his loans cleared? How
would he have handled it if the loan was rejected for a legitimate reason?
It has been a long time since I was a student and I wasn't too clear on these things even back then, however: my impression is that situations like that are common, and forced by various deadlines -- usually the schools' deadlines, but for international students, it can be their visas. All sorts of wierd-ass catch-22 situations result from policies like "you must be a registered student to qualify (for this thing you need to register)".
I went to a private institution (not a state school, where they don't seem to give a rats ass) and I have heard many horror stories from the nice Financial Aid people about what various students have had to go through (generally in the context of the nice FinAid people trying desperately to rescue some kid's education). There are only several thousand ways to be fucked over (wrt paying tuition); a fluke credit report is only one of them, and not necessarily any less just than some of the other reasons you can be turned down for a loan or grant.
Your best strategy is always to keep on Being A Student to the extent you can, right up to the moment they throw you out. If you can't register officially, talk to the profs and sit in the classes anyways so that when/if the money clears up, you won't be behind in your studies. Stay on campus if at all possible -- going home (unless home is very nearby) makes it damn hard to walk into the FinAid office and fill out forms. Etc.
Most kids going in to college have a "red flag" or two in their credit report.
You're kidding right? Is that actually true? Most kids don't have credit, right? If you're under 18, you basically can't have credit in your name, because (unless an emancipated minor) your signature is legally worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
While the word "addiction" has completely valid clinical meaning, it is frequently appropriated to dismiss/disparage/condemn people who are to enthusiastic about something, and not cynical and disengaged and aloof -- not *cool* -- enough.
It serves among adults the sampe purpose as the term "geek" does in the school yard. Too interested in playing in the school band? "Band geek." Too interested in talking to playing MUDs? "Addicted to the internet."
There's a whopping cult of cynicism in the US. Being enthusiastic, excited, earnest, interested transgresses against this cult. Being "cool" means being cynical, aloof, disinterested, etc. If you don't conform to this cult of cynicism, refuse to behave "cool", the name-calling starts.
Disagree? Well, why is it in these diatribes (however gently put) as to how addictive the Internet is, people seem to feel free to invoke "balance" --
-- but it only applies to to people who use the net "too much". If these pundits really cared about balance where are the gently put expressions of "concern" about people who don't get enough internet? About people who are "phobic" and avoid the net? Why aren't there comments of concern about such people's psychological well being?Instead, someone who avoids the net is indulged as a reasonable person who perhaps is a touch eccentric, or more likely seen as being more pure and aloof from a crass modern lifestyle.
No, "balance" is not the issue.
This still just boils down to grown-up name-calling.
You know what? Life can really stink in the US. Living in a culture in which you are never supposed to really be emotionally invested in anything except work and family is really soul-sucking. It should come as no surprize that if someone finds something the slightest bit fun, something that is interesting and engaging, something that lets them feel the slightest sense of success or getting something accomplished -- on-line or off! --it will really hit home. On-line, there's no one calling you a geek, or giving you dirty looks, for not being "cool enough", so, duh, of course people turn to the net to vent their enthusiasm.
Jesus Fucking Christ, I don't believe this. There is not one post yet which points out that in the corporate environment, EMAIL CLIENTS ARE TOYS NOT TOOLS.
Of course workers are getting bogged down in email. They're using Outlook for heaven's sake, or Netscape or Eudora or Notes. These products are the most unspeakably half-assed crap -- I have used all of them extensively, and know whereof I speak -- and it's impossible to manage email in them.
How do they suck? Oh, let me count the ways:
Anything which does formatting (HTML email, etc.) takes longer to render, so you have to pause for that much longer on every message. It's infintessimal on a single message, but it adds up fast when you have 100 messages a day.
The filtering on those products is unforgivably lame. To the extent they manage to filter, they then are helpless to cope with filtered mail.
Speaking of rendering time: they go to all that effort to have snazzy window-y GUIs, and then don't put the power to, say, color code on a filter basis into the hands of the user. Brilliant.
They have no flexibility of identity, which is one part of the equation of functional corporate email. It is imperative that the user be able to specify both Reply-to and From fields in his out going message. If Joe Rep is one of the several people receiving the emails sent to "moreInfo@somecompany.com", he must be able to send email From, or at least Reply-to "moreInfo@somecompany.com".
The concept of filtering as implemented in those packages is the paradigm of paper in cabinets. WHAT THE HELL? It should be possible to put one message in multiple "mailboxes", but only have one actual copy stored -- and the client should tell you where the multiple copies are, and behave sanely if you delete one.
There is no, not one, no, not any of these products with any provision, whatsoever, of the timely retirement of email into archives. Some permit something like manually saving things to archives, but none let you say "this folder, move read messages into that archive after two months". So these email clients are completely unscalable through time. After you have used one for a year, you're drowning in relics, which you want to save but are in your way. The idea that anyone would routinely throw away email is absurd. Diskspace is dirt cheap, there is no excuse. A sane method of archiving is vital -- a method which allows you to "put away" things you're not using, but take them down when they are needed again.
I could (and someday will) go on and on and on about how worthless the tools corporate users are expected to use. But it's not just the mail clients! If you want users to not spam everyone, have a viable place for them to send that info: set up lists and boards sanely, so people use them. Make it easy for people to be added or removed from lists. Have policies in place to handle contractors and temps; it is not sane to expect all important instructions to go over email lists which your temps aren't on, and expect for your temps to know what to do. Duh.
Have aliases or lists for interfacing with the public, so that outsiders don't have to know the name of the relevant person they should contact. "Sales@yourcompany.com" (for example) should go to the right group of people, and every time they respond to one of those emails, everyone else in that group should be notified. Duh.
And, Duh, their email client should prominently clue them into the fact the email they are responding to is not to them personally, but to the "sales" alias.
It all boils down to the fact that corporate email systems -- their configurations from a usability standpoint, and their god-awful clients -- are at best children's toys, not professional tools for getting real work done.
There is no product up to that description, frankly. Meanwhile, we geeks will continue using terminal-based solutions. Some swear by emacs, some by pine. Me, I have a homebrew concoction of nmh, procmail, several bzillion little shell scripts, and my own domain (so I can have all the email addresses I ever want). It's not even close to adequate, but it's so far in advance of corporate toys it's pathetic.
I know that lots of people sneer at geek's tendency to try to solve human problems with technological solutions, but DAMN, this is precisely the kind of problem to be solved technologically.
Yes. Rather.
Your failure to use the rhetoric correctly is telling. The expression is "teach by example". There is no such thing as "learn by example"; the reciprocal concept is to "learn from example". Teaching by example means exemplifying what you want your students to learn; being the example. That is to say: one teaches humility by being humble, or not at all. It is generally how I understand Jesus and Mother Theresa to have gone about it -- but no doubt you have a much superior methodology they would have benefitted to know.
Perhaps you mean "make an example of"? That's the practice of abusing one person in the hopes it will intimidate many others.
DAMN STRAIGHT Yahoo selling porn is an OUTRAGE!
PR0N WANTS TO BE FREE!
Goddamn, I remember the good ole days of the Net, before the stinking web and its stinking crass commercialism invaded this golden land of cyberspace -- back when there was actually CONTENT, by goddess, on alt.sex.bondage -- and people made and shared porn from the goodness of their gonads, without any thought of profit.
Oh, this is filth all right -- FILTY LUCRE! Yahoo should be ashamed, contributing to the perversion of the Net like that.
There is only one response! I call on /.ers to rise up (as it were) and contribute OPEN SOURCE PR0N for the good of humanity!
MIT provides all students with round-the-clock computer access on high-quality UNIX workstations. The rest of your post is not worth commenting on.
Wow! Thanks for the pointers.
I take it you've never visited a "Sales pit", have you? :)
Waitaminit.
The majority of kids don't learn to treat each other that way from their parents. They often do get the impression that it's OK with adults to do so, after they do it and don't get in trouble.
No, a very few kids learn it from their parents... but then they "teach" it to their peers, and that's where most kids "learn to treat each other that way".
Violence behaves like a contagion, and we know virulence varies with population density. Take one kid who is getting knocked around at home, and lock 19 other kids in with him, and soon you have 20 violent, acting-out kids.
While it would be nice to "blame" the parents of the "patient zero" kid, it doesn't actually solve anything. You can't prevent crazy, sick people from having kids, and you can't prevent people with kids from getting crazy or sick. There will always be kids in any school system who are "carriers" for violence.
The way to ameliorate this problem is simple: reduce the population density of kids. Don't put them in large groups. The violence won't spread as rapidly, and may die out before it becomes endemic.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for telling the parents who let their kids become absuive what crappy human beings they are -- "BAD PARENT. NO BISCUIT." -- and would gladly string up someone who abuses their own kid.
But I'm far more intrigued by ways to actually reduce human suffering. Pointing fingers is, as emotionally satisfying as it may be, not really a substitute for logical problem solving. This is precisely one of those cases where changing the functioning of the system can have dramatic "tipping point" effects, and it has nothing to do with who is at fault.
Humbling people does not make them humble. Humiliating people does not give them humility.
Myself, I was noticing the background was very da Vinci-esque, and was thinking late 15th, but willing to grant maybe mid-15th, because the style of illustrating the rocks in the foreground was not sufficiently naturalistic. I was being conservative: 1449 minus 150 equals 1299, or the last moments of the 13th century.
YKYBITSCATLW! I spend a-lot-but-not-enough time looking at early 13th century pictoral evidence of/for women's clothing. If all -- if any 13th century illuminations were as naturalistic and clear as this one, my life would be much, much easier. I confess my first thought was "13th century? Bah! You can tell what she's wearing! I wish!"
Now, as a med/ren-geek myself, I must take issue with your tone in:
Please! They had a different, but not wholly unfathomable aesthetic. They found symmetry beautiful, and it is not merely in their paintings this appears. We find it, for instance, in their dance choreographies: what is done to the left is then done to the right. It was an expression of order and "mesura" (measure, balance, harmony).
Furthermore, the positioning of people (and, interestingly, buildings) in Italian (at least) Ren painting had all sorts of complex symbolism which was evident to contemporary viewers, but not to the naive modern viewer. When we moderns look at a painting, we expect to look into a window; we expect to look at the figures of a painting. But the contemporaries of da Vinci read paintings. They expected them not merely to be beautiful, but to have meaning, to, perhaps, tell a story, or express and opinion. When you think about it, they were much more semiotically aware.
So to criticise the composition of an early Ren painting by the standards of a Baroque composition, is like criticising a work of prose fiction for not rhyming and having iambic pentameter. That's not what it's supposed to do, not how it's supposed to work, never what it was intended for. It misses the point.
... how an allegedly medieval monk knew how to paint a picture with renaissance perspective.
Mandlebrot, schmandlebrot. According to the accompanying picture, he figured out the vanishing point 150 years before anyone else!
They have no choice; acording to The Downside Deathwatch, financially their backs are up against the wall.
But Slashdot isn't Salon -- which is why I read both. I read Slashdot to participate; I read Salon to be entertained.
Yes, Salon has discussion fora, but I find them lame. What I am willing to pay for is a really good daily magazine.
Would I pay to post on Slashdot? No. Well, not unless CmdrTaco lifts the karma cap.
Unfortunately, the things which make /. cool would be killed if there were barriers to entry. (Actually, I do belong to a discussion forum with barriers to entry, and it is cool in a very different way.) /. wouldn't be /. if, for instance, the scientists who are the focus of a story couldn't find out about the ruckus here and wade in to the discussion. That sort of things happens, and it can't happen when one must pay to participate.
How does this work? That's easy. My current client is a famous research company which sells it's reports on a subscription basis (for big, big bucks) and delivers primarily via the web these days. And they're wildly successful (as in "in the black") doing this.
The thing that you're missing is that Salon's subscription service will also have subscriber-only content. Which is important. And makes it much more what my client does.
Simply put, it is in the best interests of subscribers not to share proprietary info with all their friends. It's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation simple enough even your average luser gets it. Subscribers want to continue receiving very high quality content. They know that if that content isn't profitable it goes away.
Here's the big crucial clue everyone has missed so far: there is a difference between buying a virtual good -- like an e-book -- and subscribing to a a virtual service.
If you can rip off an e-book, and yeah, more or less you come out ahead. You got what you want. Authors rant about how if you don't pay for the one you want now, they won't be able to afford to make the next one. But, as everyone knows, that's a crap shoot. Just because an author wrote a book you liked doesn't mean you will necessarily care about the next book. Authors too numerous to mention have let their readers down on sequels. So the market is not terribly responsive to their pleas.
But a subscription is a relationship. You front your money with the belief that you will regularly get high quality content. If you don't think you will get sufficiently good content over the life of your subscription, you don't subscribe. And because it is a relationship, the other side can pull the plug if you cheat. But even more importantly, it is in your best interest to make sure that the company fulfilling the other end of your subscription-contract is still around to do so!
If you deprive the company with whom you have a subscription-contract of paying customers, they are going to stiff you the content you expect to get. Real simple.
Unlike with stand-alone good, in a subscription model, the seller has hostages.
Sure, there will be people who rip off a small number of articles. At my afforementioned client corp., they chalk such things up to good publicity, and just don't sweat it.
As far as security goes, the answer is to not have rigorous security. Tell people what the rules are, and if them break them, kill their accounts, no refund. If one name/password pair were to show massive simultaneous usage to multiple diverse IPs, don't you think they'd pull the plug?
I'm a contractor. I've had something like 50 to 60 clients in the last 9.75 years, on jobs ranging from one day to 8 mos. I consider it "anthropological research."
Maybe I have worked for your company!
Why on earth does this article pit "engineers" against "people"?
Where do they get off making no mention of the managers who refuse to pay for real QA? Who micromanage their designers? Who insist "make it blue"?
Why is there no mention of designers who seem never to have heard the adage "form follows function"?
I confess more than a little irritation that "engineers" are taking the rap for their PHBs, for the airheads in marketting who care more about releasing a product at the right moment than whether that product is ready for prime time, for designers who care more that there's a cohesive colorscheme than that it presents the user with a compelling metaphor.
It has never been my experience that it was the techs on a project who wanted to get the project done faster rather than better. 99 times out of 100, management has to pry the techs' fingers from the code ("No, really, code freezes NOW.") Similarly, it's not the techs saying "gee, why waste the money on real QA specialists."
In my experience, coders have immense respect for usability (even those who don't know how to make it themselves) and robustness, but are never taken seriously when they say "no, that's not how we should be doing it; it would be better if...". To blame them as a class for the failures in robustness and usability of their code is salt in the wound.
Do you actually have evidence for that, or is it one of those "everybody knows" sorts of things?
And, frankly, is the the issue even relevant to whether it should be taught to kids in schools?
Seriously, when I was a kid (elementary school, jr high) I did a lot of peer-tutoring in math, because I witnessed for myself how damaging most math classes were to my peers' mathematical intuitions (which in young kids starts out pretty good). I seriously mean to say that the majority of those classes were egregiously counterproductive, ingraining in kids terrible habits of mind and attitudes about the behaviour of abstracts, which greatly interfered with their ability to pursue real mathematics.
I really don't think that, even if arithmetic is more easily learned when very young, we can trust the classroom to impart that skill without savaging all but the brightest students' facility for true mathematical abstraction.
Interesting. There was a very similar experiement performed with reading, many years ago.
IIRC, the parameters were a class of kids was not taught to read until ~4th grade. After about 9 weeks of instruction, these kids were vastly out-performing the control group which had received standard reading instruction from kindergarten on.
Everything you write presupposes an independent and uncompromised State, and all markets being vital, option-rich free markets. But if a corporation can buy governmental power -- for instance, through bribing senators or judges, or through kingmaking, or getting state-sponsored monopolies -- than the State becomes a puppet of Corporations. And if markets are ruled de-facto monopolies or the major players in them price-fix, then the Corporation can become a kind of de-facto government.
And those are precisely the problems which so many anti-Corporatists perceive. Schooling is a good example: there are many places where the supply of "seats" in private schools is less than the demand, and being able to get into a private school at all is literally a crap shoot (see the whole Charter School issue in MA).
While I am completely behind homeschooling, and advocate it 100%, don't get me wrong -- saying "there's homeschooling as an alternative to the lack of reasonable choices in private schools" is precisely like saying "if you don't like the business practices of the two grocery stores in your town, grow your own food." There's a lot of merit to it -- but it in no way addresses the problems of the market.
Nope, it says just what its supposed to. It does make sense. Think about it.
"I'll bet you $100 that I can, too land a plane with both hands behind my back!"
Er, no. This is about muscular nerves. Picking out eight myoelectrical signals through (several?) cm of meat is no mean feat, but distinguishing what's going on in millions of ganglia through a skull? And that's merely considering the scale difference; I dimly recall the idea that muscular nerves were qualitatively different than the ones which we think with.
The subject says it all, really. :)
We can't change whether the law is implemented, but be can change how it is implemented. So write to the FCC to demand they institute a policy whereby:
If there is going to be a private industry censoring what Americans can read in their libraries, then there'd better be checks and balances. We can take advantage of this situation to force filtering software companies to be more ethical and responsible.
It has been a long time since I was a student and I wasn't too clear on these things even back then, however: my impression is that situations like that are common, and forced by various deadlines -- usually the schools' deadlines, but for international students, it can be their visas. All sorts of wierd-ass catch-22 situations result from policies like "you must be a registered student to qualify (for this thing you need to register)".
I went to a private institution (not a state school, where they don't seem to give a rats ass) and I have heard many horror stories from the nice Financial Aid people about what various students have had to go through (generally in the context of the nice FinAid people trying desperately to rescue some kid's education). There are only several thousand ways to be fucked over (wrt paying tuition); a fluke credit report is only one of them, and not necessarily any less just than some of the other reasons you can be turned down for a loan or grant.
Your best strategy is always to keep on Being A Student to the extent you can, right up to the moment they throw you out. If you can't register officially, talk to the profs and sit in the classes anyways so that when/if the money clears up, you won't be behind in your studies. Stay on campus if at all possible -- going home (unless home is very nearby) makes it damn hard to walk into the FinAid office and fill out forms. Etc.
You're kidding right? Is that actually true? Most kids don't have credit, right? If you're under 18, you basically can't have credit in your name, because (unless an emancipated minor) your signature is legally worthless.