How many times has someone said "I just want it to be compatible with what I use at work", or "My kids are going to use it for their homework."
Eventually parents are going to start asking that question and coming up with OS and office suite answers other than "Microsoft"... because they'll be asking their kids. And if the current situation is still like it was when I was a teenager, it's the kids that are gonna set up and maintain the computer, so the ease-of-setup barrier will be circumvented for many folks.
How is this different from citing a source by page number in a printed work? That too is a form of deep linking, albeit (usually) not in electronic form. Do we now need to sue everyone who actually wrote a paper in college?
All the volume of materials that is now being recycled will still be generated if it's NOT recycled. Perhaps it's only 20% of NYC's refuse volume... that still means the landfills fill up much faster. What then? How about we repeat history? Perhaps not.
Recycling now is very likely to be cheaper than developing a new landfill 20% sooner than planned, or finding a new source of clean water, or a myriad of other long-term consequences... like the humiliation of having your garbage chased home by Mexican gunboats, for instance.:)
Remember that the US Senate is one of the great bastions of political gamesmanship.
It's probably a safe bet that Hollings hasn't suddenly switched his basic pro-media position. If that's so, then this bill may well be a maneuver to counteract someone else's bill.
For instance, in the recent campaign finance reform debates, the opponents of CFR floated a *better* bill, that they knew would not pass, as a way to divide the support for a CFR bill that might pass. This could well be a similar maneuver.
Pay close attention to the men behind the curtains.:)
It seems to me that there's no way to fully regulate things to get all porn into a.prn TLD. Even aside from practical issues, there's the free speech implications that'll keep it in the courts forever. (And rightfully so, IMHO.)
On the other hand, it would be relatively straightforward to set aside a TLD for, say, ".fam" where all content is certified "family-safe", and a registrant of whatever.fam has to agree to the content standards of the.fam TLD. This would reduce the problem to enforcement of a contract, instead of a persistent challenge to the first amendment. It could be done in the private sector, even.
But that's probably WAY too practical to make it in the Real World, let alone in congress.:)
It sounds really good to grow corn, brew ethanol, and use it to replace oil as a fuel. There's just one little problem... until recently, it took more energy (in oil) to grow corn to make ethanol than the ethanol could produce.
There's been gains recently, though, so there's hope for the future.
At last they can try to bring the strange and wonderful characters of Barsoom to the big screen. And they're gonna need some serious digital artistry to make Deja Thoris look *half* as good as she does when Burroughs describes her.:)
I hope they get one of the great Hong Kong fight directors for this, too. Imagine what they could do with low gravity and Tars Tarkas!
This bill looks like a non-starter in its present form with the present congress, but that doesn't mean it's DEAD. There's a powerful industry with a powerful lobby that wants this, and just 'cause it's unpopular doesn't mean they're gonna stop trying.
The assertion that we prosecuted this war without ground troops is flatly wrong.
In our case, they were called "Allies". I don't mean to diminish the contribution of our special and aerial forces, they clearly tipped the scale from a multi-year stalemate to a decisive victory. Yet our airstrikes would not have been effective without the forward observers in the special forces. In turn, they could not have held positions near the front without protection from opposing infantry. Time and again, history has proven that the only sure protection from an infantry assault is more infantry.
To use this campaign as evidence that technology has made infantry irrelevant is just as absurd now as it has been every other time someone claimed it.
The role of the infantryman is going to be important in any ground action. I don't entirely discount the possibility of an artificial infantryman someday, but we aren't there yet.
As for war becoming painless when drones fight, I doubt it. Even if the battlefront is completely composed of opposing drone-swarms, the concept of strategic deterrence still holds. Absent impervious air-defense, the option to directly attack the opposing civilian population is still available. Such punishment of enemy civilians will continue to be at least as horrific in the future as it was in the days of "Bomber" Harris, General Sherman, or Atilla the Hun.
The big deal here is not the technology. (Even though "dynamic stability" has tons of other applications waiting to be discovered.) The big deal is not the speed, or the price, or the hype.
The big deal is "It is the first [vehicle] that doesn't isolate you from other pedestrians." Think about that... I'm sure Dean Kamen has.
For instance, just think about the potential to change the way we grow cities. (It's not certain to do so by any means, of course... that depends on substantial mass acceptance.) But if you consider the way cities looked before the automobile, and how they look today, it's easy to see the impact of the automobile.
This has the potential to have an impact of a similar magnitude. IT isn't going to take us back, but if it catches on it's going to take us somewhere else.
... this information was indeed publicly available. Previous posters' statements that the DMV driver's database was published on tape agree with my recollection.
This first came to widespread public attention when someone got this information and published it (or a substantial part of it) on the web. It provoked lots of outrage, and the policy was quickly changed. (If the Oregonian has an open archive, I'm sure there's many stories on this to be found there.)
However, the new law on it stank. They could have simply asserted that it's public record, and made it open to all. And they could have asserted that it's too dangerous to have that much information (collected by mandatory means) on the citizenry publicly available, and locked it up tight. Either approach would be defensible.
Instead, they raised the price of it, and made it available to corporations willing to pay, but not to individuals. Thus we got the benefits of neither extreme solution, and the disadvantages of both. Grrr.
It's not that they lacked evidence that Mr. Bunner had posted DeCSS. The question was simply "Where does that posting stand legally?"
I think the real lesson in this quote:
Nevertheless, the court concluded that "[t]he circumstantial evidence, available mostly due to the various defendants' inclination to boast about their disrespect for the law, is quite compelling on both the issue of Mr. Johansen's improper means [and] th[e] Defendants' knowledge of impropriety."
... is something else entirely. Despite the apparent monolithic nature of the courts, when it comes to trial it's a human judge we face. That judge will be influenced, positively or negatively, by the behavior of the parties in the case. (As well as the larger rhetorical setting...) And let's be realistic; to a judge, the law is his life's work. For a judge, disrespect for the law is likely the next best thing to a personal insult.
Those of us who think a law is silly, stupid, and shortsighted will be vastly better off to focus our rhetoric around words like "freedom", "liberty", and even "interoperability" than around words like "silly", "stupid", and "shortsighted".
(You'll also see in the footnote [5] that they did not apply this broad brush to Mr. Bunner: "There was no evidence that Bunner himself had ever contributed any of these writings indicating disrespect for the law." )
I also note, with some amusement, that Mr. Bunner may have hurt his case by taking DeCSS down. IANAL, but this (from [6]) looks significant:
Since the record before us reflects that Bunner had already removed DeCSS from his web site and neither party argues that the trial court's injunction was a mandatory injunction, it is appropriate to view the trial court's order, at least as to Bunner, as simply a restraining injunction.
I got the impression that the appelate court would have been obligated to scrutinize a "mandatory injunction" more closely that they would a "restraining" one. Didn't matter here, because the First Amendment got involved, but still... interesting.
I've gone to both types of schools, so I think I'm in an especially good position to address this question. Before I give my opinion, let me bore you with some personal background:
First, straight out of high school, I got a scholarship to a pretentious liberal-arts university, and I majored in math. I burned out after three years due to life circumstances (that had nothing to do with the education I was getting) and went to work.
Once committed to the working world, I pursued skills training on an ad-hoc basis, never really searching for a degree. I got training in welding, drafting, mediation, and am now working on an MCSE. (Let's just say it's been a diverse career path.:)
What I've found is that the university education I had gave me a great deal of wonderful information, that was of marginal utility in the working world... at first. As time goes by, though, the seemingly scattershot diversity of my university education has continued to coalesce into a unified whole, as life gives me more context with which to tie disparate subjects together. The idea that this would happen seemed purest fantasy to me back when I was twenty.
Likewise, I found that the various skills trainings I have had produced excellent benefits in the short term, but their utility rapidly diminished over time. As my career has careened along, I've found that every four years or so I need to invest in a new set of training to help me excel, as the previous training becomes irrelevant to my job. In the tech world, of course, one also has to fret about obsolescence. (Fat lot of good that MCSE will do me in two years if I roll out linux, but it's a good interim approach to my work.)
The REALLY interesting thing to me is that the broad, liberal-arts education I recieved early on has seemed to amplify the effectiveness of my skills trainings. On the job one learns What to do, in training one learns How to do it, but a broader education lets one deduce Why a thing should (or should not) be done, even when it's beyond the explicit scope of work or training.
So, to address the original question, "Yes, a well-rounded education is a good thing." In my mind, though, a truly well rounded education is one that gives a person a broad base of knowledge *and* a set of focused, up-to-date skills. In my experience, no single institution will provide this; it's best to pick and choose one's own program from academic and technical/vocational schools.
Lastly, let me give some words of advice to folks getting started out there.
First, learn to write well. Anyone who can write well by academic standards will set themselves apart from most people in the working world. I work in an office with about fifty people; about three of us can write worth a damn. Our peers who can't write well defer to us in all sorts of matters that have nothing to do with writing, just because we present our ideas well. English is not a trivial subject, no matter your primary focus... I guarantee you will use it again if you're good at it.
If you're a tech-head, take humanities courses. It may seem trivial and irrelevant now, but its utility grows with age. It's something that will not help you much in the working world, but will help with everything *else* in life, such as good citizenship.
Lastly, learn to think for yourself, to check your assumptions and recognize box canyons of thought. I absolutely guarantee that there will be times when you are wrong, and what your boss tells you to do is also wrong. You will be a hero every time can recognize this before it is too late. (How to effectively tell your boss he's wrong is left as an excercise for the reader.:)
We're all familiar with the cliche "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." (It'd be a pretty lousy cliche if not, eh?) So here's a history lesson:
The Maginot line was a superb fortification built by the French between the world wars. It covered most of the border between Germany and France, and was as modern and effective a defense-in-depth as could be built at the time. (See Steven Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers" for one evaluation.) Attacking it directly would entail a bloodbath for the Germans. Tactically and strategically, it was an almost total success: the Germans dared not assault it until the winter of '44-'45, when it proved very effective indeed.
Instead, the Germans blitzkrieged through Belgium and took Paris in something like fourty days.
While the Maginot line itself was a success, the policy behind it was not. Trusting that the Germans would respect Belgium's neutrality, and that they couldn't attack through the Ardennes even if not, France neglected her mobile forces. These were, when the moment came, not up to the task of stopping the Germans.
So are we repeating history? I think so. Even if we develop an impervious shield against ballistic missle attack, other routes for attack abound. Thinking that NMD solves the rogue-state problem is like thinking a firewall appliance protects your network. It's true as far as it goes... which isn't all that far.
Not only do these other options exist, they're a helluva lot easier than cobbling up a working ballistic missle. (Can you say "Containerized Freight"?) What's worse, such attacks will be MUCH harder to track to their origins than a ballistic missle. What good is a deterrent force if you don't know whom to hit back?
I don't disparage the technical accomplishments of NMD so far... the collision they managed was a darn difficult task even if it turns out that they did cheat. (Why, by the way, do you need to broadcast GPS once the target is on a ballistic track? Gravity is pretty darn predictable...)
I think it's clear that this is a dubious allocation of resources. It's very expensive insurance against a very unlikely event. Those billions of dollars could do a lot more good doing other things, even if they never left the defense budget. This limited defense gives every appearance of being a PR device and a boon to the military-industrial complex.
Now if we really mean to abandon MAD, we'd unilaterally proclaim that we will bring NMD on-line with all due haste, and cut offensive weapons one-for-one until we had only a couple hundred SLBM warheads left. We'd still have credible retaliatory power, we'd still be vulnerable to a backpack nuke, and we'd impress the hell out of the rest of the world. If NMD is worth doing at all, why not go all the way?
Right or wrong, this practice is about as old as newspapers. Ben Franklin's first published writings were letters to the editor of his brother's paper, sent under pseudonyms. It was a common practice in those times, for reasons of marketing or politics or both. Apparently the net has fertilized a revival of the practice... or maybe we just noticed it again.:)
Slashdot Mirror
How many times has someone said "I just want it to be compatible with what I use at work", or "My kids are going to use it for their homework."
Eventually parents are going to start asking that question and coming up with OS and office suite answers other than "Microsoft"... because they'll be asking their kids. And if the current situation is still like it was when I was a teenager, it's the kids that are gonna set up and maintain the computer, so the ease-of-setup barrier will be circumvented for many folks.
How is this different from citing a source by page number in a printed work? That too is a form of deep linking, albeit (usually) not in electronic form. Do we now need to sue everyone who actually wrote a paper in college?
All the volume of materials that is now being recycled will still be generated if it's NOT recycled. Perhaps it's only 20% of NYC's refuse volume... that still means the landfills fill up much faster. What then? How about we repeat history? Perhaps not.
:)
Recycling now is very likely to be cheaper than developing a new landfill 20% sooner than planned, or finding a new source of clean water, or a myriad of other long-term consequences... like the humiliation of having your garbage chased home by Mexican gunboats, for instance.
Remember that the US Senate is one of the great bastions of political gamesmanship.
:)
It's probably a safe bet that Hollings hasn't suddenly switched his basic pro-media position. If that's so, then this bill may well be a maneuver to counteract someone else's bill.
For instance, in the recent campaign finance reform debates, the opponents of CFR floated a *better* bill, that they knew would not pass, as a way to divide the support for a CFR bill that might pass. This could well be a similar maneuver.
Pay close attention to the men behind the curtains.
It seems to me that there's no way to fully regulate things to get all porn into a .prn TLD. Even aside from practical issues, there's the free speech implications that'll keep it in the courts forever. (And rightfully so, IMHO.)
.fam TLD. This would reduce the problem to enforcement of a contract, instead of a persistent challenge to the first amendment. It could be done in the private sector, even.
:)
On the other hand, it would be relatively straightforward to set aside a TLD for, say, ".fam" where all content is certified "family-safe", and a registrant of whatever.fam has to agree to the content standards of the
But that's probably WAY too practical to make it in the Real World, let alone in congress.
It sounds really good to grow corn, brew ethanol, and use it to replace oil as a fuel. There's just one little problem... until recently, it took more energy (in oil) to grow corn to make ethanol than the ethanol could produce.
There's been gains recently, though, so there's hope for the future.
At last they can try to bring the strange and wonderful characters of Barsoom to the big screen. And they're gonna need some serious digital artistry to make Deja Thoris look *half* as good as she does when Burroughs describes her. :)
I hope they get one of the great Hong Kong fight directors for this, too. Imagine what they could do with low gravity and Tars Tarkas!
This bill looks like a non-starter in its present form with the present congress, but that doesn't mean it's DEAD. There's a powerful industry with a powerful lobby that wants this, and just 'cause it's unpopular doesn't mean they're gonna stop trying.
This fight will *never* be over. Semper Vigilans!
On the bright side, it will rapidly deplete the population of people with WAY more money than sense. Mile deep club indeed!
... they'll unveil a perpetual motion machine!
Mod parent up!
I've always wanted to know how to build my own
P-47! Woo-hoo! Now all I need is a couple hundred thousand dollars. Hmmm...
The assertion that we prosecuted this war without ground troops is flatly wrong.
In our case, they were called "Allies". I don't mean to diminish the contribution of our special and aerial forces, they clearly tipped the scale from a multi-year stalemate to a decisive victory. Yet our airstrikes would not have been effective without the forward observers in the special forces. In turn, they could not have held positions near the front without protection from opposing infantry. Time and again, history has proven that the only sure protection from an infantry assault is more infantry.
To use this campaign as evidence that technology has made infantry irrelevant is just as absurd now as it has been every other time someone claimed it.
The role of the infantryman is going to be important in any ground action. I don't entirely discount the possibility of an artificial infantryman someday, but we aren't there yet.
As for war becoming painless when drones fight, I doubt it. Even if the battlefront is completely composed of opposing drone-swarms, the concept of strategic deterrence still holds. Absent impervious air-defense, the option to directly attack the opposing civilian population is still available. Such punishment of enemy civilians will continue to be at least as horrific in the future as it was in the days of "Bomber" Harris, General Sherman, or Atilla the Hun.
War is hell, and thus it will remain.
Drat! Now where will I show my new short film "AdCritic: The Final Days" ??!?
http://www.despair.com/consulting.html
'nuff said.
The big deal here is not the technology. (Even though "dynamic stability" has tons of other applications waiting to be discovered.) The big deal is not the speed, or the price, or the hype.
The big deal is "It is the first [vehicle] that doesn't isolate you from other pedestrians." Think about that... I'm sure Dean Kamen has.
For instance, just think about the potential to change the way we grow cities. (It's not certain to do so by any means, of course... that depends on substantial mass acceptance.) But if you consider the way cities looked before the automobile, and how they look today, it's easy to see the impact of the automobile.
This has the potential to have an impact of a similar magnitude. IT isn't going to take us back, but if it catches on it's going to take us somewhere else.
Well, that should relieve everyone on Slashdot no end! :)
... this information was indeed publicly available. Previous posters' statements that the DMV driver's database was published on tape agree with my recollection.
This first came to widespread public attention when someone got this information and published it (or a substantial part of it) on the web. It provoked lots of outrage, and the policy was quickly changed. (If the Oregonian has an open archive, I'm sure there's many stories on this to be found there.)
However, the new law on it stank. They could have simply asserted that it's public record, and made it open to all. And they could have asserted that it's too dangerous to have that much information (collected by mandatory means) on the citizenry publicly available, and locked it up tight. Either approach would be defensible.
Instead, they raised the price of it, and made it available to corporations willing to pay, but not to individuals. Thus we got the benefits of neither extreme solution, and the disadvantages of both. Grrr.
I think the real lesson in this quote:
Those of us who think a law is silly, stupid, and shortsighted will be vastly better off to focus our rhetoric around words like "freedom", "liberty", and even "interoperability" than around words like "silly", "stupid", and "shortsighted".
(You'll also see in the footnote [5] that they did not apply this broad brush to Mr. Bunner: "There was no evidence that Bunner himself had ever contributed any of these writings indicating disrespect for the law." )
I also note, with some amusement, that Mr. Bunner may have hurt his case by taking DeCSS down. IANAL, but this (from [6]) looks significant:
I got the impression that the appelate court would have been obligated to scrutinize a "mandatory injunction" more closely that they would a "restraining" one. Didn't matter here, because the First Amendment got involved, but still... interesting.I've gone to both types of schools, so I think I'm in an especially good position to address this question. Before I give my opinion, let me bore you with some personal background:
:)
:)
First, straight out of high school, I got a scholarship to a pretentious liberal-arts university, and I majored in math. I burned out after three years due to life circumstances (that had nothing to do with the education I was getting) and went to work.
Once committed to the working world, I pursued skills training on an ad-hoc basis, never really searching for a degree. I got training in welding, drafting, mediation, and am now working on an MCSE. (Let's just say it's been a diverse career path.
What I've found is that the university education I had gave me a great deal of wonderful information, that was of marginal utility in the working world... at first. As time goes by, though, the seemingly scattershot diversity of my university education has continued to coalesce into a unified whole, as life gives me more context with which to tie disparate subjects together. The idea that this would happen seemed purest fantasy to me back when I was twenty.
Likewise, I found that the various skills trainings I have had produced excellent benefits in the short term, but their utility rapidly diminished over time. As my career has careened along, I've found that every four years or so I need to invest in a new set of training to help me excel, as the previous training becomes irrelevant to my job. In the tech world, of course, one also has to fret about obsolescence. (Fat lot of good that MCSE will do me in two years if I roll out linux, but it's a good interim approach to my work.)
The REALLY interesting thing to me is that the broad, liberal-arts education I recieved early on has seemed to amplify the effectiveness of my skills trainings. On the job one learns What to do, in training one learns How to do it, but a broader education lets one deduce Why a thing should (or should not) be done, even when it's beyond the explicit scope of work or training.
So, to address the original question, "Yes, a well-rounded education is a good thing." In my mind, though, a truly well rounded education is one that gives a person a broad base of knowledge *and* a set of focused, up-to-date skills. In my experience, no single institution will provide this; it's best to pick and choose one's own program from academic and technical/vocational schools.
Lastly, let me give some words of advice to folks getting started out there.
First, learn to write well. Anyone who can write well by academic standards will set themselves apart from most people in the working world. I work in an office with about fifty people; about three of us can write worth a damn. Our peers who can't write well defer to us in all sorts of matters that have nothing to do with writing, just because we present our ideas well. English is not a trivial subject, no matter your primary focus... I guarantee you will use it again if you're good at it.
If you're a tech-head, take humanities courses. It may seem trivial and irrelevant now, but its utility grows with age. It's something that will not help you much in the working world, but will help with everything *else* in life, such as good citizenship.
Lastly, learn to think for yourself, to check your assumptions and recognize box canyons of thought. I absolutely guarantee that there will be times when you are wrong, and what your boss tells you to do is also wrong. You will be a hero every time can recognize this before it is too late. (How to effectively tell your boss he's wrong is left as an excercise for the reader.
The Maginot line was a superb fortification built by the French between the world wars. It covered most of the border between Germany and France, and was as modern and effective a defense-in-depth as could be built at the time. (See Steven Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers" for one evaluation.) Attacking it directly would entail a bloodbath for the Germans. Tactically and strategically, it was an almost total success: the Germans dared not assault it until the winter of '44-'45, when it proved very effective indeed.
Instead, the Germans blitzkrieged through Belgium and took Paris in something like fourty days.
While the Maginot line itself was a success, the policy behind it was not. Trusting that the Germans would respect Belgium's neutrality, and that they couldn't attack through the Ardennes even if not, France neglected her mobile forces. These were, when the moment came, not up to the task of stopping the Germans.
So are we repeating history? I think so. Even if we develop an impervious shield against ballistic missle attack, other routes for attack abound. Thinking that NMD solves the rogue-state problem is like thinking a firewall appliance protects your network. It's true as far as it goes... which isn't all that far.
Not only do these other options exist, they're a helluva lot easier than cobbling up a working ballistic missle. (Can you say "Containerized Freight"?) What's worse, such attacks will be MUCH harder to track to their origins than a ballistic missle. What good is a deterrent force if you don't know whom to hit back?
I don't disparage the technical accomplishments of NMD so far... the collision they managed was a darn difficult task even if it turns out that they did cheat. (Why, by the way, do you need to broadcast GPS once the target is on a ballistic track? Gravity is pretty darn predictable...)
I think it's clear that this is a dubious allocation of resources. It's very expensive insurance against a very unlikely event. Those billions of dollars could do a lot more good doing other things, even if they never left the defense budget. This limited defense gives every appearance of being a PR device and a boon to the military-industrial complex.
Now if we really mean to abandon MAD, we'd unilaterally proclaim that we will bring NMD on-line with all due haste, and cut offensive weapons one-for-one until we had only a couple hundred SLBM warheads left. We'd still have credible retaliatory power, we'd still be vulnerable to a backpack nuke, and we'd impress the hell out of the rest of the world. If NMD is worth doing at all, why not go all the way?
Right or wrong, this practice is about as old as newspapers. Ben Franklin's first published writings were letters to the editor of his brother's paper, sent under pseudonyms. It was a common practice in those times, for reasons of marketing or politics or both. Apparently the net has fertilized a revival of the practice... or maybe we just noticed it again. :)