All minds are the same. They just need to be molded.
We're all the same except for differences in opportunities.
If we use rote memorization we can create millions of new programmers, who will be adequate and spend lots of hours in the office (I mean "work hard").
Genius is a myth and does not exist. It's just pure practice and the right training.
Give me your average mouth-breather and through the magic of education I can transform him into a top-performing coder overnight.
We are all equal! If you disagree, you are a Communist.
What has changed in the USA since the time of its technological dominance?
1. Rise of the welfare state. 2. Population replacement
(a) Homegrown white trash "Dancing with the Stars" types are not longer seen as stupid and useless, but average.
(b) Smart people don't breed.
(c) Democratic party is hell-bent on importing voters to replace the majority.
(d) Too many safety regulations, not enough open land, have reversed upward trend of natural selection. 3. Focus on "service industries" instead of innovation. 4. Too much fantasy world stuff, whether weird cult religions, Twilight, Harry Potter, etc.
It's not rocket science to see this civilization is collapsing.
During times of great national unity, when there's a clear perceived threat, you can get this kind of cooperation.
Right now, the US and most industrial nations are so internally divided that they would be unable to pull this off. There is no longer a culture, sense of shared purpose, or goal.
While some consider this a benefit, it means we're all sitting ducks when someone comes around who has their act together. China comes to mind.
Unless you live in a small city or elite suburb, the quality of public schools is so bad that you're better off homeschooling.
The obstacle here is not the cost of the books, but the cost of the time. You need to have one spouse stay at home to do that. It doesn't matter which spouse, but the most stable kids seem to come from homes like this.
At our local public school, kids receive more political/social education than actual knowledge.
Summary: it's the quality of the researcher that determines whether or not they can do significant research throughout their lifespan.
Younger people have more energy and more drive, but someone of a powerful intellect and insight is going to generate useful material for the whole of his or her life.
This isn't limited to science. Great composers, writers, artists and philosophers tended to be productive for the whole of their lives.
That this coincides with Wikipedia's annual beg-a-thon for funds is entirely accidental, I'm sure.
Wikipedia after all seems to be have been a Google project to keep search results relevant by incentivizing college students to plagiarize their textbooks into an online encyclopedia with the standards of a blog.
It's a great place to find information about popular culture items. But for anything else, it has a chilling effect. It dominates search results to the degree that people treat it as an absolute source, probably while quoting "1984" about the dangers of absolute, centralized power.
If SOPA reminds us not to trust governments and its manipulations, we should probably ask ourselves: what really is the difference between a democratic government and a democratic group blog like Wikipedia? If they have the same weakness, won't they fail in the same ways, but in different areas?
For example, SOPA takes down sites. Wikipedia however allows us to categorize people as criminals, hackers, anti-social, etc. and allows an "official" opinion to predominate as to the legitimacy of their points of view. How many valid viewpoints have been squelched by Wikipedians refusing to recognize them?
Put another way, if you can't trust a bunch of old guys in suits not to become corrupt, why can you trust a bunch of stoned basement dwellers to avoid corruption? It becomes important when you realize that Wikipedia has a greater cultural influence than even government does.
In the 1970s, one manufacturer made the hardware, operating system and (most of) the software.
Apple wanted to resurrect that model in the 1990s and got beaten back by the "open" architecture PC clones, which were from a more flexible type of system.
Apple finally rediscovered its favorite business model in the iPhone, because cell phone customers haven't yet figured out that phones are little computers with antennas now.
Jobs and his cronies killed Hypercard because it would have thwarted that model. With Hypercard, all software was driven by a powerful database and configured as interface. It would have revolutionized the web and how we make custom software (now done in VBscript) today.
But, it might have let things get out of control, and Apple couldn't allow that.
As an insider source, Slashdot gets to inject ideas into the mainstream of computer evolution, but by staying invisible, does not become a target in itself.
This is not an advocacy of hipster elitism, which likes to hide the good stuff away for insiders. It's a way of saying that Slashdot has influenced all parts of this industry, and rarely gets credit, which allows it to continue in its role as influence.
Like Open Source software, open source "ideas" spread more quickly than ideas which are owned or defended by moneyed interests.
1. IT staff are asked to make computers work, when computers are a complex interaction between hardware and software, most of which is shaped by commercial interests for their own profit or created by non-profits with no interest in business use. 2. Users tend to be unreliable, inarticulate and lack the ability to remember basic procedures in reporting errors. 3. Businesses inevitably strangle IT for funding where it needs it, preferring to spend on the salaries of managers, touchy feelgood "training," and gee-whiz gizmos that achieve very little.
Con-IT:
1. IT managers have difficulty standing up to the demands from marketing and management in order to insist on what is likely instead of what "might be possible." 2. Most people in IT have poor social skills and aren't as smart as they think they are, leading to them projecting an aura of arrogance that offsets users. Sympathy for the user is often lacking. 3. Because IT is a hot topic job, the kiss-asses get promoted over the competent and stable, which leads to a proliferation of incompetents while the heroes get driven into the back room.
When you ran into trouble with the way your document was displaying, you could hit show codes and edit the paired tags (a lot like HTML).
No program should ever hide your data so that you cannot directly edit it when the "interpretive" parts of the program guess incorrectly about what you want.
The first and foremost abuse of this is web-based comment fields with little mini-GUIs to help you format your text. When the system "guesses" the wrong bullet point, or line spacing, etc. you can fix the problem in three seconds with a show codes option.
Sadly, many programs and web sites do not do this. They think it's too complicated for their users. While this may be true of the 90%, it's not true for the rest, and they're slowing us down with the simpleton interface.
Intoxicants, legal or not, bring with them negative behaviors. If you don't agree, feel free to move next to the drug users of your choice, including downtown bars. When you get tired of having your car broken into and your front stoop urinated upon, maybe you'll see my point of view.
Having experienced drug culture inside and out, I am very skeptical of its benefit. It encourages people to not apply themselves to life, and instead to take lots of drugs/alcohol as a substitute for honestly feeling good about life.
What we need in this modern world is not more distractions, but fewer. Given that even marijuana -- the "gentlest drug" -- seems to have negative effects on its users, such as a higher rate of mental health problems and a variety of health problems, it's unwise to legalize.
Let Mexico solve its own problems. And if the world loses a few bloggers, who really cares? We have seven billion people and all of them can tweet about what they're eating or write "poignant" blogs about being alone in the rain.
The FreeBSD community takes a "blame the user" stance that is going to alienate most desktop users, who want to use the machine to get something done and don't want to be held up by snafus that may take days to fix.
Much of BSD's documentation is wrong or vague, many things are still broken within the OS and especially in the parts a desktop user would use, and when there is a problem, there's nowhere to go for a clear, quick solution.
A friend of mine installed FreeBSD on some older hardware and couldn't get the mouse to work. After two weeks of back-and-forth on the mailing list, someone else chimed in that they had the same problem... and then another... and another. It turned out that for the previous for years the FreeBSD community had been screaming "RTFM" at people, when the error was actually in the FreeBSD code.
Most desktop users are going to prefer Linux or Windows, despite the decreased efficiency, because they work and when you have a problem, there are multiple resources so that you can resolve it quickly. With FreeBSD, a broken driver may require 30 minutes to fix, or 48 hours of solid hacking. If you're trying to use your computer to do something unrelated to the operating system, that's too painful of a loss of time.
PageRank worked for almost a decade because it lists results from popular sites before obscure sites.
The internet has changed.
Nowadays, Google is great if you're looking for popular stuff like lolcats, memes, angry blogs, discussion forums full of questions and no answers, or corporate propaganda from the 10,000 websites owned by the 10 largest companies in the world.
But for anything else, you can search for days without finding the good stuff. Google is less useful to me at this point than IRC, because if you find someone who knows your topic area, you can find the expert-level sites from that person.
As Samuel Huntington mentioned in "The Clash of Civilizations," our 222-year flirtation with internationalist liberal democracy is coming to an end and nationalism is rising.
If you generate a constant stream of bad data, the cost of separating good data from bad will rise. This in turn will encourage law enforcement, who get rewarded for convictions in the least amount of time and have other cases they can pursue, to move on to the next case.
Many people, who are miserable because of poor life decisions, decide that it's not their fault and they will blame those in charge.
After all, it's not like no one forced them to buy those cheeseburgers, sign those ARMs, demand more expensive government programs and cheer on the expensive wars.
It's all bread and circuses, until the drones/proles get upset, and then it's revolution... and a long fall from being a superpower to being a nobody.
This message brought to you by France, Rome, Angkor Wat, Easter Island, Athens and Tenochtitlan.
Remember when trolls were funny, and not just "hey we're a crowd, let's destroy something"?
The end result of this will be thousands of CDs that will serve no purpose, and will end up in the landfill along with every other remnant of human selfishness on earth.
Might as well just shoot a spotted owl straightaway.
There's an alarming amount of pro-liberal, pro-government and pro-business propaganda on Sesame Street in addition to the lessons of childhood. I wouldn't trust it any more than late Soviet propaganda.
I agree with everything you've said, and have only one thought to offer:
All of these bad things -- consumerism, meaninglessness, joblife and rampant capitalism -- originate in the demand by individuals that life be convenient and tailored to them.
We don't have a Hitler, Genghis Khan or Sauron to blame for this one. Only ourselves, and our handy tools like democracy, self-expression and freedom which apparently let us become self-obsessed little voids of meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of kindergarten view of the world is this?
Wars start for political reasons, usually competition for territory, dominance or resources.
Let's let the adults back in the room now.
This could be an innocent move. Microsoft does not want you booting any other OS that could circumvent Windows security.
I mean, isn't this how we all fix our Windows machines now, namely booting a live CD and then mounting the NTFS drive so we can fix it directly?
For Microsoft to claim these devices are secure (an impossible boast, yet one business and government want to hear) they need to close this loophole.
All minds are the same. They just need to be molded.
We're all the same except for differences in opportunities.
If we use rote memorization we can create millions of new programmers, who will be adequate and spend lots of hours in the office (I mean "work hard").
Genius is a myth and does not exist. It's just pure practice and the right training.
Give me your average mouth-breather and through the magic of education I can transform him into a top-performing coder overnight.
We are all equal! If you disagree, you are a Communist.
Address the TSA agents as "Comrade Citizen."
What has changed in the USA since the time of its technological dominance?
1. Rise of the welfare state.
2. Population replacement
(a) Homegrown white trash "Dancing with the Stars" types are not longer seen as stupid and useless, but average.
(b) Smart people don't breed.
(c) Democratic party is hell-bent on importing voters to replace the majority.
(d) Too many safety regulations, not enough open land, have reversed upward trend of natural selection.
3. Focus on "service industries" instead of innovation.
4. Too much fantasy world stuff, whether weird cult religions, Twilight, Harry Potter, etc.
It's not rocket science to see this civilization is collapsing.
See you all at 2600.
During times of great national unity, when there's a clear perceived threat, you can get this kind of cooperation.
Right now, the US and most industrial nations are so internally divided that they would be unable to pull this off. There is no longer a culture, sense of shared purpose, or goal.
While some consider this a benefit, it means we're all sitting ducks when someone comes around who has their act together. China comes to mind.
Unless you live in a small city or elite suburb, the quality of public schools is so bad that you're better off homeschooling.
The obstacle here is not the cost of the books, but the cost of the time. You need to have one spouse stay at home to do that. It doesn't matter which spouse, but the most stable kids seem to come from homes like this.
At our local public school, kids receive more political/social education than actual knowledge.
Summary: it's the quality of the researcher that determines whether or not they can do significant research throughout their lifespan.
Younger people have more energy and more drive, but someone of a powerful intellect and insight is going to generate useful material for the whole of his or her life.
This isn't limited to science. Great composers, writers, artists and philosophers tended to be productive for the whole of their lives.
Methadrone, noise/drone/post-rock with a metal soul.
http://www.myspace.com/methadrone
That this coincides with Wikipedia's annual beg-a-thon for funds is entirely accidental, I'm sure.
Wikipedia after all seems to be have been a Google project to keep search results relevant by incentivizing college students to plagiarize their textbooks into an online encyclopedia with the standards of a blog.
It's a great place to find information about popular culture items. But for anything else, it has a chilling effect. It dominates search results to the degree that people treat it as an absolute source, probably while quoting "1984" about the dangers of absolute, centralized power.
If SOPA reminds us not to trust governments and its manipulations, we should probably ask ourselves: what really is the difference between a democratic government and a democratic group blog like Wikipedia? If they have the same weakness, won't they fail in the same ways, but in different areas?
For example, SOPA takes down sites. Wikipedia however allows us to categorize people as criminals, hackers, anti-social, etc. and allows an "official" opinion to predominate as to the legitimacy of their points of view. How many valid viewpoints have been squelched by Wikipedians refusing to recognize them?
Put another way, if you can't trust a bunch of old guys in suits not to become corrupt, why can you trust a bunch of stoned basement dwellers to avoid corruption? It becomes important when you realize that Wikipedia has a greater cultural influence than even government does.
In the 1970s, one manufacturer made the hardware, operating system and (most of) the software.
Apple wanted to resurrect that model in the 1990s and got beaten back by the "open" architecture PC clones, which were from a more flexible type of system.
Apple finally rediscovered its favorite business model in the iPhone, because cell phone customers haven't yet figured out that phones are little computers with antennas now.
Jobs and his cronies killed Hypercard because it would have thwarted that model. With Hypercard, all software was driven by a powerful database and configured as interface. It would have revolutionized the web and how we make custom software (now done in VBscript) today.
But, it might have let things get out of control, and Apple couldn't allow that.
As an insider source, Slashdot gets to inject ideas into the mainstream of computer evolution, but by staying invisible, does not become a target in itself.
This is not an advocacy of hipster elitism, which likes to hide the good stuff away for insiders. It's a way of saying that Slashdot has influenced all parts of this industry, and rarely gets credit, which allows it to continue in its role as influence.
Like Open Source software, open source "ideas" spread more quickly than ideas which are owned or defended by moneyed interests.
Pro-IT:
1. IT staff are asked to make computers work, when computers are a complex interaction between hardware and software, most of which is shaped by commercial interests for their own profit or created by non-profits with no interest in business use.
2. Users tend to be unreliable, inarticulate and lack the ability to remember basic procedures in reporting errors.
3. Businesses inevitably strangle IT for funding where it needs it, preferring to spend on the salaries of managers, touchy feelgood "training," and gee-whiz gizmos that achieve very little.
Con-IT:
1. IT managers have difficulty standing up to the demands from marketing and management in order to insist on what is likely instead of what "might be possible."
2. Most people in IT have poor social skills and aren't as smart as they think they are, leading to them projecting an aura of arrogance that offsets users. Sympathy for the user is often lacking.
3. Because IT is a hot topic job, the kiss-asses get promoted over the competent and stable, which leads to a proliferation of incompetents while the heroes get driven into the back room.
Show codes.
When you ran into trouble with the way your document was displaying, you could hit show codes and edit the paired tags (a lot like HTML).
No program should ever hide your data so that you cannot directly edit it when the "interpretive" parts of the program guess incorrectly about what you want.
The first and foremost abuse of this is web-based comment fields with little mini-GUIs to help you format your text. When the system "guesses" the wrong bullet point, or line spacing, etc. you can fix the problem in three seconds with a show codes option.
Sadly, many programs and web sites do not do this. They think it's too complicated for their users. While this may be true of the 90%, it's not true for the rest, and they're slowing us down with the simpleton interface.
Grrr.
No drug is without harm.
No government should endorse harmful behavior.
Intoxicants, legal or not, bring with them negative behaviors. If you don't agree, feel free to move next to the drug users of your choice, including downtown bars. When you get tired of having your car broken into and your front stoop urinated upon, maybe you'll see my point of view.
Having experienced drug culture inside and out, I am very skeptical of its benefit. It encourages people to not apply themselves to life, and instead to take lots of drugs/alcohol as a substitute for honestly feeling good about life.
What we need in this modern world is not more distractions, but fewer. Given that even marijuana -- the "gentlest drug" -- seems to have negative effects on its users, such as a higher rate of mental health problems and a variety of health problems, it's unwise to legalize.
Let Mexico solve its own problems. And if the world loses a few bloggers, who really cares? We have seven billion people and all of them can tweet about what they're eating or write "poignant" blogs about being alone in the rain.
The FreeBSD community takes a "blame the user" stance that is going to alienate most desktop users, who want to use the machine to get something done and don't want to be held up by snafus that may take days to fix.
Much of BSD's documentation is wrong or vague, many things are still broken within the OS and especially in the parts a desktop user would use, and when there is a problem, there's nowhere to go for a clear, quick solution.
A friend of mine installed FreeBSD on some older hardware and couldn't get the mouse to work. After two weeks of back-and-forth on the mailing list, someone else chimed in that they had the same problem... and then another... and another. It turned out that for the previous for years the FreeBSD community had been screaming "RTFM" at people, when the error was actually in the FreeBSD code.
Most desktop users are going to prefer Linux or Windows, despite the decreased efficiency, because they work and when you have a problem, there are multiple resources so that you can resolve it quickly. With FreeBSD, a broken driver may require 30 minutes to fix, or 48 hours of solid hacking. If you're trying to use your computer to do something unrelated to the operating system, that's too painful of a loss of time.
http://fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu/
PageRank worked for almost a decade because it lists results from popular sites before obscure sites.
The internet has changed.
Nowadays, Google is great if you're looking for popular stuff like lolcats, memes, angry blogs, discussion forums full of questions and no answers, or corporate propaganda from the 10,000 websites owned by the 10 largest companies in the world.
But for anything else, you can search for days without finding the good stuff. Google is less useful to me at this point than IRC, because if you find someone who knows your topic area, you can find the expert-level sites from that person.
As Samuel Huntington mentioned in "The Clash of Civilizations," our 222-year flirtation with internationalist liberal democracy is coming to an end and nationalism is rising.
http://www.pan-nationalism.org/
If you generate a constant stream of bad data, the cost of separating good data from bad will rise. This in turn will encourage law enforcement, who get rewarded for convictions in the least amount of time and have other cases they can pursue, to move on to the next case.
A forest, a shotgun and a laptop.
Same story:
Many people, who are miserable because of poor life decisions, decide that it's not their fault and they will blame those in charge.
After all, it's not like no one forced them to buy those cheeseburgers, sign those ARMs, demand more expensive government programs and cheer on the expensive wars.
It's all bread and circuses, until the drones/proles get upset, and then it's revolution... and a long fall from being a superpower to being a nobody.
This message brought to you by France, Rome, Angkor Wat, Easter Island, Athens and Tenochtitlan.
Remember when trolls were funny, and not just "hey we're a crowd, let's destroy something"?
The end result of this will be thousands of CDs that will serve no purpose, and will end up in the landfill along with every other remnant of human selfishness on earth.
Might as well just shoot a spotted owl straightaway.
There's an alarming amount of pro-liberal, pro-government and pro-business propaganda on Sesame Street in addition to the lessons of childhood. I wouldn't trust it any more than late Soviet propaganda.
I agree with everything you've said, and have only one thought to offer:
All of these bad things -- consumerism, meaninglessness, joblife and rampant capitalism -- originate in the demand by individuals that life be convenient and tailored to them.
We don't have a Hitler, Genghis Khan or Sauron to blame for this one. Only ourselves, and our handy tools like democracy, self-expression and freedom which apparently let us become self-obsessed little voids of meaning.