Climate change is but one of the problems we face. Pollution, loss of species, erosion and depletion of natural resources are all big problems as well.
The sad fact is that all of these have a single cause: humans, or rather, too many humans.
The rest of the developing world is going to follow this pattern. Soon we'll all be emitting high amounts of carbon, but even more, each of us will require a lot of land for our lifestyles. Not just our homes, but roads, hospitals, shopping, parking, schools, storage, government buildings, etc.
For every person we put on this earth, there's less space for the natural world and its forests and oceans which renew our air and water. Earth is finite; humans are acting like its capacity to have new humans is infinite.
We're all in denial of how simple this is. There are too many people. We're making even more. At some point, we will have used up enough land so that pollution, species loss and loss of renewable resources makes us get a Darwin award as a species.
Back in the early days, hackers were young hobbyists.
The people who are most dangerous now are simply criminals who've learned to operate computers.
Teenage and young adult hacking is part of the learning process and should be encouraged as part of the growth process. Most of those people will go on to futures in computer science.
What happened in the 1980s may have been a culture, but hacking is a skill, like programming, or spying, or forensics.
You can teach it, if you find the intelligent and dedicated people.
The problem is that government alienates such people. First, it's heavy on rules and regulations (a/k/a "conservative"); second, it's designed to reward participation instead of excellence (egalitarianism, a liberal trait).
If you want to know why hackers, artists and philosophers end up alone in vans down by the river, it's because they can't stand your stultifying society. Don't try to bring them into it and crush what's great about them; instead, fix your society so that it nurtures such traits.
The problem is that "troll" is a term used to mean anyone who says something unpopular, as well as anyone who deliberately provokes other people into tantrums.
The better question is whether we will have anonymity at all. I know from looking at the comments on CNN and other newspapers that a lot of sites would rather dispense with anonymity entirely.
The problem with this is that it is de facto censorship of important opinions. Racial information (the ultimate taboo), anti-democratic thought, anti-mainstream culture and even occult religions all need protection.
When we call declare someone with unpopular opinions a "troll" and look up their IP, these ideas won't get expressed on the big sites, leaving only small dissident blogs that 99% of the internet audience will never see.
It's not a popular notion, but it's unreasonable to expect privacy in public acts like searches conducted through a third party website (Google).
Any government knows that if a terrorist event or other great "problem" occurs, and they had the option to stop it by filtering through searches, the government will get blamed for not stopping the event.
For this reason, all modern governments are going to inspect packets and filter searches. Whether they pass that information on down to local law enforcement is dubious, because a lot of these "crimes" involve foolish people killing one another and not the catastrophic effect on the middle classes that a terrorist attack might cause.
While evolution is a big deal, the flip side is that even non-religious people have trouble accepting that we're all different. Teaching class differences, gender differences, or differential evolution to different racial, ethnic and geographic groups is still so taboo that it will get you fired right away.
There's also choice of topic, slant of the article and what is included or excluded.
I see, for example, they excluded the chart with the average IQs of all nations.
Slant of article is tough to define, but it's your approach to the topic. "Self-Appointed 'Neighborhood Watch' guy shoots innocent teen" or "Angry Teen with marijuana possession offense attacks neighborhood watch official."
As long as there are people, there will be political bias, and Wikipedia still leans left because the people behind it are mostly students.
Many people steal, but kleptomaniacs have a compulsion to steal independent of need. As this article illustrates, the root of kleptomania is a desire for revenge upon a world that the person feels has treated them unfairly. This includes emotional mistreatment, which is independent of a high salary or success in life.
We're seeing Perl as having moved because we have moved. Perl has kept doing what it has always done at a high level of excellence.
The market shifted. First, many Perl programmers shifted to PHP once the net decided security and economy of processing power were not goals on the table. Second, a lot of newer programmers are reliant on frameworks and other pre-built systems and learned the languages that go with those.
However, among those who've just kept making things work for the past 15 years, Perl remains alive and well. It is still the fastest way to get the widest range of tasks done. And if you don't code like an obscurantist maniac, it's easy to maintain.
It may look to us like Perl went away, but what really happened was an infusion of other people and trends. Now that the free money from a dot-com booming economy has gone away, Perl is shining through once again as the reliable and powerful option that it is.
FacePlant seems determined to repeat the mistakes of MySpace.
Once you get all those people on the site, you just must turn them into cash cows, instead of taking a decent payout in advertising. The MBAs just insist.
The result is that soon interacting with the site becomes a pain in the neck and the smart people leave. They are replaced by many, many more people, but we all know that the number of warm bodies is only part of the story.
When you lose those top echelon users, your site starts to become a virtual tenement. Soon it's a kicking around ground for the lost, like MySpace, Digg, and other dot-com burnouts.
If a nuclear terrorist event occurs under an American President, he'll be seen as a traitor who betrayed the people.
As a result, there's going to be much more intrusion into our lives to prevent this possibility.
We've gone from a world in which five first world powers had nuclear weapons to one in which many powers potentially have the ability to make nukes or dirty bombs.
It's a brave new world, and to avoid those brave new consequences, our police will be getting more intrusive. I think most of us support this because the risk to us is slight, the risk of the power "expanding" (slippery slope) is slight because it's so specific, and the consequences are so awful.
That's a good point. What I said was that even if we cut emissions to the bare minimum by living in mud huts, subsistence farming, etc. we're not going to be able to stop carbon emissions.
If we visualize this as an equation:
P x R = I
Population times average Resource use equals total Impact.
Then we can see that if we decrease R, but raise P, we cancel out any benefits gained.
Even more, there's another variable, which is the only truly fixed commodity we have -- the open land that replenishes our water, air, etc. and filters out toxins.
P x R = I - F
If we reduce the amount of Forest, we have more impact. There is also a minimum amount of Forest below which we start losing natural species and living in a toxic gasmasks-required Fallout 3 type world.
"Overall effective Federal tax rates on the top 0.01 percent of earners have declined from about 70% in 1960 to about 35% in 2005, while effective rates for the middle class have remained constant over the same period."
What's happened is that social spending has risen, so the average productive person is getting less for their tax money, and seeing their tax money going to support non-productive people.
If you want less carbon emitted, reduce our population.
We are not going to achieve zero carbon emissions, but we need more (a) natural land and forests to absorb that and (b) fewer producing sources.
All people produce some carbon. Having seven and then nine billion people guarantees we will be unable to stop the increase even if we all live in mud huts, eat vegetables and bury our poop.
Instead of trying to make add-ons to Slashdot, or other slashdots, expand the categories available for article posting and let us filter them by what we want to see.
The frontpage is already populated with stuff that's far from "news for nerds," and most of us like it that way. Just make/. the news aggregator for people with IQs higher than their sock sizes (as opposed to Fark, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.)
Personally I enjoy the mix that Slashdot brings out. It's anything a nerd/geek would find interesting and want to hack on. Even if that's in the world of economics, big data, academia or inter-species love.
Your message contains very insightful observations of desktop computing. Hats off to you.
I miss the days when I had absolutely idiot jobs that required about 1/10 of my brain 1/10 of the time, and I could do things like check out old hardware, install Linux and screw around until my fingers fell off. I have blown up many an operating system, and fixed many of them in turn.
Right now, I'm just a VM junkie. While Windows has improved quite a bit (I never knew it had a built in sort command until today) it's sometimes great to have a virtual Linux or BSD box for experimentation and development.
Then again, I've got another emulator also. I keep KEGS running in the background in case I need a quick game of Arkanoid or Centipede.
Nerds like to fiddle, geeks like to tweak, but the average person does not see the computer as an end in itself. To them it is a tool to be used as a means to achieve other ends, and to that end, it must just work.
They do not want to spend long time configuring software. When a problem arises, they want a relatively singular solution. They don't want more options, they want better-organized options with good documentation and a support structure, and a clear "there's a right way to do it" hierarchy.
Linux is a hobbyist's system. Sometimes, it can take a week of hacking to get a soundcard to work. Often, software isn't a matter of being a tool, but a custom library that requires scripting. The normal user is not concerned about this.
Further, in the grand tradition of communities that sabotage themselves going back to the Amiga and Apple II communities of yore, the Linux community is self-sabotaging. First, it likes to imply a dichotomy between "knowledgeable" users and by implication un-knowledgeable users, when the actual dichotomy is more like hobbyists versus people using the computer for something else. Second, it is downright hostile to users when they make requests for technical help. Finally, it spends most of its energy on "fun" projects and ignores vital upgrades to existing but incomplete projects, including documentation.
Linux is a great achievement, and my life is better for it, but it has a long way to go to be ready for the desktop. Of course, one company adopting a distro and putting in the work to make it competitive could change all this, but with the community so hostile to anything corporate, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
You say there are already women in the workplace who know how to handle this behavior.
Have the new woman consult with these women.
Then, go tell the men what exactly (but anonymously) these women thought about the behavior.
I'm sure the term "third grade behavior" will come up somewhere.
Climate change is but one of the problems we face. Pollution, loss of species, erosion and depletion of natural resources are all big problems as well.
The sad fact is that all of these have a single cause: humans, or rather, too many humans.
As of right now, the average Chinese person emits as much carbon as the average European -- and there are many more Chinese people.
The rest of the developing world is going to follow this pattern. Soon we'll all be emitting high amounts of carbon, but even more, each of us will require a lot of land for our lifestyles. Not just our homes, but roads, hospitals, shopping, parking, schools, storage, government buildings, etc.
For every person we put on this earth, there's less space for the natural world and its forests and oceans which renew our air and water. Earth is finite; humans are acting like its capacity to have new humans is infinite.
We're all in denial of how simple this is. There are too many people. We're making even more. At some point, we will have used up enough land so that pollution, species loss and loss of renewable resources makes us get a Darwin award as a species.
Reddit, Digg, YouTube, and FaceBook have a standard of comments so low that Slashdot looks like the Encyclopedia Brittanica in contrast.
Perhaps we can get CmdrTaco into a forum with more standards, or just do the chat in cryptocat and post the result here.
Back in the early days, hackers were young hobbyists.
The people who are most dangerous now are simply criminals who've learned to operate computers.
Teenage and young adult hacking is part of the learning process and should be encouraged as part of the growth process. Most of those people will go on to futures in computer science.
The criminals will not.
The Internet. We should probably mention this, as well as a refresher:
What happened in the 1980s may have been a culture, but hacking is a skill, like programming, or spying, or forensics.
You can teach it, if you find the intelligent and dedicated people.
The problem is that government alienates such people. First, it's heavy on rules and regulations (a/k/a "conservative"); second, it's designed to reward participation instead of excellence (egalitarianism, a liberal trait).
If you want to know why hackers, artists and philosophers end up alone in vans down by the river, it's because they can't stand your stultifying society. Don't try to bring them into it and crush what's great about them; instead, fix your society so that it nurtures such traits.
The way to teach critical thinking is to teach the liberal arts.
When kids learn to analyze literature, and philosophy, and to debate, they learn all of these skills.
The "critical thinking" courses have become propaganda.
Sadly, so have most liberal arts courses. You learn more about race, gender and homosexuality than the book you're studying.
Have we gone full Soviet in the USA?
The problem is that "troll" is a term used to mean anyone who says something unpopular, as well as anyone who deliberately provokes other people into tantrums.
The better question is whether we will have anonymity at all. I know from looking at the comments on CNN and other newspapers that a lot of sites would rather dispense with anonymity entirely.
The problem with this is that it is de facto censorship of important opinions. Racial information (the ultimate taboo), anti-democratic thought, anti-mainstream culture and even occult religions all need protection.
When we call declare someone with unpopular opinions a "troll" and look up their IP, these ideas won't get expressed on the big sites, leaving only small dissident blogs that 99% of the internet audience will never see.
It's not a popular notion, but it's unreasonable to expect privacy in public acts like searches conducted through a third party website (Google).
Any government knows that if a terrorist event or other great "problem" occurs, and they had the option to stop it by filtering through searches, the government will get blamed for not stopping the event.
For this reason, all modern governments are going to inspect packets and filter searches. Whether they pass that information on down to local law enforcement is dubious, because a lot of these "crimes" involve foolish people killing one another and not the catastrophic effect on the middle classes that a terrorist attack might cause.
While evolution is a big deal, the flip side is that even non-religious people have trouble accepting that we're all different. Teaching class differences, gender differences, or differential evolution to different racial, ethnic and geographic groups is still so taboo that it will get you fired right away.
There's also choice of topic, slant of the article and what is included or excluded.
I see, for example, they excluded the chart with the average IQs of all nations.
Slant of article is tough to define, but it's your approach to the topic. "Self-Appointed 'Neighborhood Watch' guy shoots innocent teen" or "Angry Teen with marijuana possession offense attacks neighborhood watch official."
As long as there are people, there will be political bias, and Wikipedia still leans left because the people behind it are mostly students.
Many people steal, but kleptomaniacs have a compulsion to steal independent of need. As this article illustrates, the root of kleptomania is a desire for revenge upon a world that the person feels has treated them unfairly. This includes emotional mistreatment, which is independent of a high salary or success in life.
We're seeing Perl as having moved because we have moved. Perl has kept doing what it has always done at a high level of excellence.
The market shifted. First, many Perl programmers shifted to PHP once the net decided security and economy of processing power were not goals on the table. Second, a lot of newer programmers are reliant on frameworks and other pre-built systems and learned the languages that go with those.
However, among those who've just kept making things work for the past 15 years, Perl remains alive and well. It is still the fastest way to get the widest range of tasks done. And if you don't code like an obscurantist maniac, it's easy to maintain.
It may look to us like Perl went away, but what really happened was an infusion of other people and trends. Now that the free money from a dot-com booming economy has gone away, Perl is shining through once again as the reliable and powerful option that it is.
Um... that's not different enough.
They teach us about Thomas Edison in schools. Everyone thinks he's great. Therefore, there must be another way.
To be hip, we talk about Tesla instead. You probably haven't heard of him.
FacePlant seems determined to repeat the mistakes of MySpace.
Once you get all those people on the site, you just must turn them into cash cows, instead of taking a decent payout in advertising. The MBAs just insist.
The result is that soon interacting with the site becomes a pain in the neck and the smart people leave. They are replaced by many, many more people, but we all know that the number of warm bodies is only part of the story.
When you lose those top echelon users, your site starts to become a virtual tenement. Soon it's a kicking around ground for the lost, like MySpace, Digg, and other dot-com burnouts.
Good thinking, FacePlant.
If a nuclear terrorist event occurs under an American President, he'll be seen as a traitor who betrayed the people.
As a result, there's going to be much more intrusion into our lives to prevent this possibility.
We've gone from a world in which five first world powers had nuclear weapons to one in which many powers potentially have the ability to make nukes or dirty bombs.
It's a brave new world, and to avoid those brave new consequences, our police will be getting more intrusive. I think most of us support this because the risk to us is slight, the risk of the power "expanding" (slippery slope) is slight because it's so specific, and the consequences are so awful.
That's a good point. What I said was that even if we cut emissions to the bare minimum by living in mud huts, subsistence farming, etc. we're not going to be able to stop carbon emissions.
If we visualize this as an equation:
P x R = I
Population times average Resource use equals total Impact.
Then we can see that if we decrease R, but raise P, we cancel out any benefits gained.
Even more, there's another variable, which is the only truly fixed commodity we have -- the open land that replenishes our water, air, etc. and filters out toxins.
P x R = I - F
If we reduce the amount of Forest, we have more impact. There is also a minimum amount of Forest below which we start losing natural species and living in a toxic gasmasks-required Fallout 3 type world.
"Overall effective Federal tax rates on the top 0.01 percent of earners have declined from about 70% in 1960 to about 35% in 2005, while effective rates for the middle class have remained constant over the same period."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_top_rates
What's happened is that social spending has risen, so the average productive person is getting less for their tax money, and seeing their tax money going to support non-productive people.
Overpopulation.
If you want less carbon emitted, reduce our population.
We are not going to achieve zero carbon emissions, but we need more (a) natural land and forests to absorb that and (b) fewer producing sources.
All people produce some carbon. Having seven and then nine billion people guarantees we will be unable to stop the increase even if we all live in mud huts, eat vegetables and bury our poop.
Instead of trying to make add-ons to Slashdot, or other slashdots, expand the categories available for article posting and let us filter them by what we want to see.
The frontpage is already populated with stuff that's far from "news for nerds," and most of us like it that way. Just make /. the news aggregator for people with IQs higher than their sock sizes (as opposed to Fark, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.)
Personally I enjoy the mix that Slashdot brings out. It's anything a nerd/geek would find interesting and want to hack on. Even if that's in the world of economics, big data, academia or inter-species love.
Your message contains very insightful observations of desktop computing. Hats off to you.
I miss the days when I had absolutely idiot jobs that required about 1/10 of my brain 1/10 of the time, and I could do things like check out old hardware, install Linux and screw around until my fingers fell off. I have blown up many an operating system, and fixed many of them in turn.
Right now, I'm just a VM junkie. While Windows has improved quite a bit (I never knew it had a built in sort command until today) it's sometimes great to have a virtual Linux or BSD box for experimentation and development.
Then again, I've got another emulator also. I keep KEGS running in the background in case I need a quick game of Arkanoid or Centipede.
We're evolving, alright. Evolving into the perfect apathetic, one-dimensional, obese, narcissistic and compassionate couch slouches.
Just a suggestion, but this time try having lifeboat space for every passenger, not every other passenger?
As history teaches us, the reason the Titanic sinking was a disaster, and not just a misfortune was that it had enough lifeboats for the government regulations of the day, which is to say, one person-space in a lifeboat for every two passengers.
Nerds like to fiddle, geeks like to tweak, but the average person does not see the computer as an end in itself. To them it is a tool to be used as a means to achieve other ends, and to that end, it must just work.
They do not want to spend long time configuring software. When a problem arises, they want a relatively singular solution. They don't want more options, they want better-organized options with good documentation and a support structure, and a clear "there's a right way to do it" hierarchy.
Linux is a hobbyist's system. Sometimes, it can take a week of hacking to get a soundcard to work. Often, software isn't a matter of being a tool, but a custom library that requires scripting. The normal user is not concerned about this.
Further, in the grand tradition of communities that sabotage themselves going back to the Amiga and Apple II communities of yore, the Linux community is self-sabotaging. First, it likes to imply a dichotomy between "knowledgeable" users and by implication un-knowledgeable users, when the actual dichotomy is more like hobbyists versus people using the computer for something else. Second, it is downright hostile to users when they make requests for technical help. Finally, it spends most of its energy on "fun" projects and ignores vital upgrades to existing but incomplete projects, including documentation.
Linux is a great achievement, and my life is better for it, but it has a long way to go to be ready for the desktop. Of course, one company adopting a distro and putting in the work to make it competitive could change all this, but with the community so hostile to anything corporate, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Remember The Bell Curve?
Any study of race or genetic differences in race, gender and class will be big trouble.
As will a study of branching in the human family tree. At some point, some humans went north, and others went seaward.
In fact, IQ studies in general tend to upset people. Stay away from these if you want a high-paying research job.