Prosecuting spammers is not an ultimate (and probably not a proximate) solution to ending spam.
The legal world is confined to physical boundaries, and the sovereignty of nations within those boundaries. Crossing into another nations borders to arrest someone, or prosecute them, is not a standard practice. This is one difficulty associated with prosecuting spammers.
Additionally, you might look at the increased costs of an additional web-server the same way someone who owns a warehouse looks at the cost of locks and doors. In a certain sense, that "extra" capacity you paid for might simply be the cost of doing business.
When you are the one spending money to pay for the maliciousness of other people - it sucks. I understand your point of view.
However, you could save yourself a lot of rage about "the authorities" if you chose instead to look at the situation differently.
Funny, I work for an elected official - and filtering the email is part of my job.
Your switcheroo-vote trick, I can assure you, won't work unless you do it en-masse. If you are not a realt threat to a politician's job, then expect to be ignored with extreme prejudice (barring some sort of dire need, press related significance, or obvious wrong that needs righting).
Regarding your idea to sign your elected official up on mailing list, etc.: it's been done. Oh god has it been done. The boss's public email address has been posted online for years, and we get everything - EVERYTHING - that you could imagine. THe funny thing is, none of it affects anyone else in the office except me. No one sees any of that spam, and it doesn't hurt our office in any real way. However, all that spam DOES hurt our constituency.
You see, knucklehead, when we get three or four legitimate constituent emails a day for help, with legislative ideas, or honest & valid complaints about some branch of our sprawling gov't - we can't get to them! It takes me an hour every day of sitting in front of a computer screen deleting spam - and the result is that is an hour that constituents DON'T GET SERVED.
All that spam does is take away from other constituents! You are screwing your neighbors out of the service they are entitled to. You subvert the ability an elected official has to serve the people he or she represents. In the long run, the little things that the OFfice of So-and-So does for people in a community don't make a huge political impact. But when you need a new medi-Care card, or the DMV is hassling you, or a city is using an ordinance improperly, or a million other things - think about what it takes for you to get help from people sworn to do so. Don't piss in the well you might be drinking from someday.
It seems to me that OSS (and in particular software under the GNU license) exists to let people who want to mess around with software code do just that. Making money off of OSS is, in this sense, an issue unrelated to the production of OSS.
Open Source Software is supposed to be messed with and exploited by anyone who cares to do so, isn't it? I don't think that for-profit businesses/corporations/etc. should be unfairly penalized for doing what anyone else has the right to do.
Looking at these profit-making enterprises and thinking, "Gee, why do they make money and not spread it around to those who made the software?" runs counter to the philosophy most OSS represents.
Many of the people who make OSS do so for all kinds of private reasons (like for fun) - only some of them get paid to do it. If this is viewed as the default state of OSS, then why are those who wouldn't get paid anyway now perceived to be losing out? I think that this/. article has too much to do with human insticts, and little to do with the production of OSS.
Let people do what they want with the software. The government already makes allowances for non-profit organizations to get $. Turn an OSS project into a non-profit and voila, a charity that a profit-making enterprise can donate to, that will simultaneously make their web-servers (or whatever) better.
As a part of my job, I have been visiting schools in a pretty large district located in Southeast Los Angeles. I always ask the principal of the school I'm visiting what they need funding for the most, and usually their first answer is "technology". They always offer up so example of how technology is great, and it helps kids, and they mention the "amazing" power point presentations, or the "wonderful" iMovie films they edited. I believe that most of the criticism leveled against technology in schools in the S.F. chronicle article is very well founded.
Using a kids version of Powerpoint does not do much for a room full of schoolchildren.
I always ask the principal about the special things they do to make sure kids learn to read, or pass whatever standardized testing controls their funding. Invariably, they always talk about the positive effects of more one on one face time with kids having trouble in certain subjects - by taking kids out of class for an hour of tutoring in reading or math, or by having them stay afterschool an hour. None of the schools I visit ever have music programs, or dance programs. They can't afford to hire a new teacher, they need bathrooms that work, etc.
For as little computers do for kids in a classroom, their capital costs are incredibly high.
Which isn't to say that someday, or in some capacity, computers will truly serve an invaluable role in the education of our young. Their high costs, in an industry that is always cash strapped (at least in Southern CA) and whose staff and faculty are largely non-technically inclined, make them a poor purchasing choice for schools.
As a sidenote, I find it a little ironic that the S.F. Chronicle article spends a paragraph or two bashing attempts to objectively measure student/school performance - but then later on in the article points to a "100-point" jump in test scores as a sign that a non-computer learning program is doing well. They can't have it both ways. Attempts to objectively measure school performance have flaws, and are thus practically unusable, or they aren't. This sort of writing makes for a poor version of objectivity.
I worked on an archaeological survey last summer and constantly wondered why my crew of about a dozen or so people was hired in the first place to survey the land. We had to hike to previously "found" sites and use a bunch of pretty unimportant measures of erosion, vegetation cover, as well as photograph and map sites. It was all circa 1920's technology (with the exception of our GPS's), and the data we colleted was very questionable (like the slope of cliff sides and the soil content). The work we did took about three months, and we only covered a tiny part of the national park we worked in.
I remember talking with one of the crew members about all of this stuff. He had worked on survey teams for about 20 years and he agreed that there were better ways to get things done. He pointed out that a pilot in a prop airplane equipped with some sort of high grade photography equipment (that would let you take infrared and other sorts of photographs) could do all of our work in less than a week. Those photos coupled with already established means of having computers analyze photos could give us extremely accurate data on soil content, vegetation cover, slope, site size, etc. He said that, unfortunatley, it is extremely expensive to do this as well (it could be done with satellites, but we did't have access to satellites that would give us the resolution we needed).
So our conversation moved on, and I wondered about a more human scaled flying baloon-digital- photography idea. He mentioned a friend of his in grad school who had tried this, and had basically been rejected by his faculty for trying such things.
This article shows that we weren't the only ones thinking about this sort of thing. It's too bad that the invention of a technology does not always lead to its widespread use. But since the/. post wanted suggestions about what this could be used for: Survey Archaeology.
This is just nit-picking, but the Egyptian pyramids did have a function(s). It is of course hard to know exactly, but there are a lot of really good educated guesses.
One that comes to mind, is that of a market-place - in front of pyramids, business took place.
Also, the pyramids were built by a permanent and a seasonal labor force from all around the region. Using communal labor, they literally served as a means of defining the Egyptian state. The hierarchy, labor, and sharing of resources involved in construction gave what could have been (and sometimes were) warring factions a larger political shape.
I think I agree with your idea, in that one cannot, say, thresh wheat faster with a pyramid. So in a strictly engineering sense, you are right. But the word "function" is a loaded term when it comes to describing the history and works of humankind (just read some "Functionalist" anthropology/sociology papers - the same term means a dozen different things). Just my 0.02.
I have a feeling that your post assumes that a specific material form implies a "technology" exists. In fact human history is littered with things like these crude batteries. It is obvious to you and me that they are not batteries in the sense we use them today.
However, if their structure and remains suggest they were constructed to hold an electric charge using volumes of intentionally mixed chemicals - what is there to deny? Give your ancestors a break. Much of what makes a technology has little to do with the inherent properties of the device itself, and a lot to do with the environmental and social economy around it.
A recent, and very popular, book was recently published by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs and Steel. If you are insterested I guarantee it will change your mind about being so sceptical about the inventions of humans in the past.
No one will read this post (seeing as how it is so late in the game on/. - at the bottom of the page, with almost 400 other posts ahead of it), but I'd like to add my opinion to the mix all the same.
I just spent about an hour reading the paper that Slate reported on here. Likewise, I just spent fifteen minutes reading the +5 posts here. Almost nobody who got moderated up has anything worthwhile to say about the actual paper or topic. Posts are either "Nascar sux0rz" or "a primer in game thoery" (from a mouth breathing k5-er no doubt).
David Ronfeldt (the paper's author) appears to be a well read, and well researched writer on the topic of game theory. He also appears to be a knowledgeable fan of NASCAR racing. I just wish that he had put his modified prisoner's dilemma diagram at the front of his paper! This "main point" was a long time coming in the paper. Having read my fair share of Game Theory papers, I can vouch for the value that readers place on brevity. Likewise, it would have been helpful if the "draft-line" metaphor had been more thoroughly threshed out mathematically.
Looking at his diagram, it seems as though Ronfeldt may have found a metaphor sufficient for explaining the outcomes and impulses of actors in this modified Prisoner's Dilemma. I don't feel that there is much more value than that in this paper.
get your ass out to your local bars and clubs, and support local music!!!
Just like in Command and Conquer Generals, there is a counter to your unit/argument. The counter is: "Local Music" often sucks a fat dong.
Although it isn't much of one, there is still a marketplace of musical acts/performers/whatever in the U.S. I can attest to the local bars around my house having a TON of shitty bands that I wish would go away. Perhaps it's that artificial pop feeds back into our authentic personal narratives, or it could just be that all the good artists DO get signed eventually, but most of the people who I would "support" by getting drunk at local bars don't deserve to play an instrument, especially not one that is amplified.
Anyway, supposing that there is some sort of indigenous (is that the right term?) music that speaks to you, I guess you're right. But honestly, that Doors cover band, Krstyl Shit, playing at the Local Turtle Races and Mechanical Bull Riding Bar Nearest You, prolly really suck;).
Yes, it's "evolutionarily invisible" in a biological sense, but certainly need not be in a cultural/technological sense.
I think that you have made my point for me. The article that this is based on has to do with a gene being discovered that is related to the capacity for speach. Literally, a physical, chemical, peice of human DNA. If you are advocating this guys mushroom argument by stating that it is invisible to genetic evolution, then we don't really have much to furiously reply to each other about do we? The notion that our ancestors ingested all sorts of mind altering things (a tradition carried out today) cannot explain the selection for genes in our entire species that facilitate modern human behavior.
Modern humans, with their mental capabilities, are a very different thing from most animals, inasmuch as we do not so much evolve new capabilities biologically, as develop them technologically. This occurs through a different kind of evolutionary process, one which depends upon communication and common understandings that lead others to derive improvements.
Look, I'm sorry for being so antagonistic, but the above isn't really true. While I will admit that I believe that humans can pass on traits to each other through teaching/communication/writing this does not remove us from the natural processes of evolution.
Yet, I think it is pretty clear that while humans have been pretty much genetically the same for tens of thousands of years, it is only in the last few thousand that such things as agriculture and modern social organizations developed. Why?
First, it is important to note that a lot of animals on earth have been "genetically the same" to the same degree that humans have been over the past couple of thousand years. Second, there is a lot of active debate and research into the origins of agriculture - the least likely of scenarios being that we have a specifically developed brain/psychology for agriculture (or any specific type of technology or subsistence strategy) brought about by the use of psychedlic plants. Third, social organization can be more effectively described as arising out of a whole host of things external to human biology (population pressure, scarcity, resource density, etc.).
The original post I responded to is obviously a mindless agenda. Take a look at the advocacy pages for his view point. Their ignorance of the history human species is not my fault.
With your bachelor's degree in Anthropology, nobody should doubt that you know precisely how cultures did or did not evolve.
As a matter of fact, my bachelors degree in Anthropology allows me to know a LOT of things. For instance, it exposes your ignorance of the history anthropology, human history, and game theory. I could write a long screed about all of these things, but why waste my time and yours? If you are hung up on a term as vague as "culutres", and presuppose that Anthropology purports to describe the evolution of these things, then there is little to be gained in me going off on things way over your head.
What is culture supposed to be anyway? A set of behavioural traits that a group of human beings express? The "Food, Music, Music, Language, World-View, etc, etc. etc" of people?
It is obvious that "culture" is a term like "art" or "music" that performs a function in describing something, but doesn't convey some sort of natural division in the world. It is loaded with historic meanings that are often at odds with each other. Where does evolution and natural selection play into any of this?
Besides, if you are talking about a group of humans as being a unit of natural selection, then you are badly mistaken.
I cannot believe that this has been modded up to 5, Informative. Our ancestors ate magic mushrooms and so developed a capacity for language and sophisticated technology?! Please!
I didn't go to grad school, but I did get a bachelors degree in Anthropology - and I like to think that I am pretty well read in the field. I can guarantee that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence linking proto-humans, or physically modern humans, to any sort of psychedelic chemical that facilitated brain development. The material evidence does not exist.
Further, I don't see how a single class of substances can be linked to brain development. There are a whole host of chemicals in the human body, the consumption of which is evolutionarily invisible. Why should magic mushrooms be so special?
This post, and this theory, sound more like an attempt to fit any Associated-Press level ideas to a world-view that embraces drug use. Anthropology has been littered with things like this for generations (e.g. social darwinism, innate criminality, race, skull volume=intelligence, aquatic evolution, and the list goes on). I say, take your agenda elsewhere.
Have I been waiting for this day on Slashdot! I know that this won't get modded up. First it is an anti-space exploration post (i.e. flamebait). Second, there are over 700 other posts out there - good luck moderators. Anyway...
Here is the next direction NASA should take into space: they shouldn't send humans into it! It is expensive. It is dangerous. It achieves little but inspiration for powerless/low social status techno-geeks.
Instead, our country should explore alternatives that advance science and technology as much as NASA uplifts our geeky spirits. There is, to my mind, only one true alternative to the wasteful, and hardly economically viable model of space exploration we currently have. That alternative is to explore and study the OCEAN.
Obviously, satellites, and mechanized thingamajigs belong in our country's arsenal of neato-exploration-based stuff. Their practical benefit is a widely heralded success.
However, the economic reality of sending people hurtling into the upper atmosphere and beyond, for a dubious "scientific" cause of "jus' cuz we can" is one that our country (and that no country on earth) can accept.
An intensive study of the ocean, based on the same sorts of ideas that NASA uses to explore space would yield inumerable direct benefits to commerce, defense, and concomitant scientific progress. Further, in terms of inspiring geeks, I can think only of the CS majors at my coastal university who I see walking alone on the beach, looking out to sea for answers. If we as a nation decide that our tax money ought to be spent in beneficial research and exploration into new frontiers, then, lone geeks on the beach everywhere, the ocean has the answers waiting for you.
This whole thing will read pretty poorly. Sorry about that, it's just hard to contain my thoughts after reading so many posts! Here's my two cents:
I read through a lot of +3-5 posts, and I saw a bunch of stuff pointing to rising rates of Bad Things in countries (AUS, UK) that have tried to limit firearms in some way. It makes sense that evidence of this kind is often quoted, the only problem is that it is used by different sides for different reasons - it makes it hard to trust. Personally, I don't think that gun ownership rates play the most significant part in gun related deaths - which seems to me to be the real issue at hand when NJ, or any other gov. tried to regulate guns. Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" had a pretty interesting idea: that gun related deaths are high in the U.S. because we have a society that primarily sees guns as a means of *defense* against other people (namely, the defense of upper middle class and rich - generally white - people from others who are disenfranchised/poor/ and prolly black). As I mentioned before, there is a lot of article quoting about rising or falling Bad Things due to gun legislation on both sides of this issue. I think that arguments of this type rely too heavily on the idea that each nation represents a sort of "natural experiment". Perhaps this is not the best way to analyze the problem. I am always reminded of knives when the gun debate arises. Knives are also used for killing (albeit anachronistically nowadays). They are in great abundance. There is most definitely a history of people impaling each other on Sharp Things, that could easily extend to knives in the present day. They do constitute a physical threat. Why not arm your home with knives if you're so afraid of being invaded? Or build a barricade. Pallisades. Gates, turrets, nests,fox holes. The idea that one lives in a large, civilized, modern, nation-state yet one must still own and religiously maintain a means of personal self defenseseems to me to be the height of hypocrisy, or simply a state of affairs that cannot exist. What kind of nation do you want to live in? One where you live in constant fear of home invasion (with guns or without)? Personally, I say get rid of the fear of being assainated by the bogey man, and THEN you can start talking about whether or not it is okay to own guns/force people to own crippled guns.
I know that this sort of testimonial is sort of worthless in a forum like this, but I have been using hotbot all afternoon (since this story was published on/.) and I'm using Mozilla 1.1 for Windows 98 (on an ancient k6-3+ proc.). I haven't noticed any clunkiness whatsoever. Every page render I've done has been exceedingly fast actually. No crashes either. Perhaps you have a different metric for slow and clumsy?
I know that what you are saying is a joke, and it is funny, but what is so wrong with exploring the ocean? There are tons of practical applications, awe inspiring sights, and places for a human to go that have never been seen before in the seas of our planet. We've already been to the freakin moon! But no one has been to the bottom of the marianas trench.
It would be an honest *progression* to invest in sea exploration rather than space exploration.
Hey I think that we all need to lighten up on Hansolosan. I think it is quite a feat that he typed that whole statement with his head that far up his ass. Plus, the RIAA are the government - after all don't they get our "sales tax" every time we buy a cd? Hello? Habla usted engles? Please cease trolling on slashdot, trying to pick apart the concerned comments of the captain of a local buttpirate ship, mutzinator! Your hateful bile will surely come back to haunt you in days to come as you struggle to turn in late assignment after late assignment!!
If the issue is that NASA generates billions of dollars towards research into novel technologies, and supporting scientists, just about any sort of field will do: the study of breakfast cereal, exploration of the insides of trees, dirt moving, anal spelunking. After years of NASA launching various types of protoplasm into high orbit, I think that the benefits of the practice are yet to be seen. If anything, humans, and other sorts of animals, being shot into space has been proven to be a monumental waste of time, money, and imagination. Why not focus on sending people to the bottom of the ocean? If anything, this sort of pointless exploration might actually yield some sort of useful benefits to humans traveling in the sea - an act which takes place millions of times daily. Plus, and I think this is the most fundamental reason that sea exploration is better than space exploration:
ahh Herr Rommel, how mistaken you are. There is a large body of evidence that in terms of big and dead, there are quite a few things that the ocean has to offer americans. Take for instance these all american types.
What is the big deal with space exploration? Doesn't it strike anyone here as an enormous waste of money? I hear freak-o right and left wingers bring up a lack of funding for different social programs all the time - but everyone seems to think it is okay to waste BILLIONS of dollars on space stations. What is the point? I can think of two, and neither are that good. 1)Space exploration (generally) funds allsorts of useful research into to fields/materials that provide a benefit to everyone. A good example of this is something like velcro, or the use of upper atmosphere satellites to monitor weather. A good counter to this argument is that this sort of research isn't limited to just space exploration. If we wanted to benefit a great deal of people with research in materials and natural laws we could do so without the monumental waste of money that accompanies hurling some yutz into orbit in a mechanical womb. 2)Space exploration inspires us/helps us dream/blah/blah/blah. This appeal to our "imagination" is so bogus that it gives me a headache just thinking about it. LSD inspires people - but those that produce it don't receive billions in government funding. Likewise, if inspiration was the point of space exploration - why couldn't we just shift focus to something other than some anthrpoid peering out of a tiny window high in orbit around Mars? The government could hire fleet of advertisers to inspire us - think of all the Nike campaigns that try to get us to feel like athletes just because we wear some flimsy shoes. The benefits of having NASA around are negligible when confronted with the realtiy of the costs to our society as a whole. We could try and tackle much more difficult feats of technical sophistication and social benifit if we redirected funds into something else. Sorry that thisis a rant, but i just get tired of incessant boosterism for something that is so truly unimportant to the betterment of the condition of humankind (and NO eventual coloniozation of other planets will not relieve problems on earth - those problems arise out of our humanity and natural facts like scarcity).
Maybe if so many script kiddies/ warez'ers/ napsterites hadn't gone so fscking overboard downloading/spamming/sharing, the legislations wouldn't have any backing.
But, unfortunately, the masses found out, and spoiled for the rest of us.
It is debatable whether or not people have actually "stolen" anything by downloading/spamming/sharing, etc. Most peoples' intuition with respect to theft relies on a material object being taken. It is debatable whether or not copying a piece of information (in the most general of cases) and disseminating it (without the consent of it's author, and with/without payment in exchange) should be a crime in the first place. It so happens that theft in the physical world of objects and property works to the disadvatage of many people - and so it is rightfully considered "theft". However, it remains to be shown whether or not some civilization-wide practical disadvantage comes about through unauthorized, unpaid for, file copying and sharing. Before blaming "the masses", maybe one should look at whose interests are being served - who is ruining what? Is it the case that downloading this stuff creates a horrible problem for our society? Or is it the case that it does nothing, or possibly makes things better? What was ruined? If you are referring to your ability to download copyrighted material, then the blame lands squarely on the legislators who wrote the laws, the courts who upheld them, the police who enforced them, and the companies and individuals who lobbied/paid for this legislation.
Microsoft does not make a profit off of it's product sales. It offers its employees shares (to reduce their labor costs), it receives tax breaks from the government, and using cooked books to report false profits it issues stocks that are pumped on MSNBC and other news networks business shows. Microsoft is, in essence, a big pyramid scheme. It does not exist to make a profit by selling software, it exists to perpetuate itself.
Here's Bill Parish's report on the issue (circa 1999):
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html
Slashdot Mirror
Prosecuting spammers is not an ultimate (and probably not a proximate) solution to ending spam.
The legal world is confined to physical boundaries, and the sovereignty of nations within those boundaries. Crossing into another nations borders to arrest someone, or prosecute them, is not a standard practice. This is one difficulty associated with prosecuting spammers.
Additionally, you might look at the increased costs of an additional web-server the same way someone who owns a warehouse looks at the cost of locks and doors. In a certain sense, that "extra" capacity you paid for might simply be the cost of doing business.
When you are the one spending money to pay for the maliciousness of other people - it sucks. I understand your point of view.
However, you could save yourself a lot of rage about "the authorities" if you chose instead to look at the situation differently.
Funny, I work for an elected official - and filtering the email is part of my job.
Your switcheroo-vote trick, I can assure you, won't work unless you do it en-masse. If you are not a realt threat to a politician's job, then expect to be ignored with extreme prejudice (barring some sort of dire need, press related significance, or obvious wrong that needs righting).
Regarding your idea to sign your elected official up on mailing list, etc.: it's been done. Oh god has it been done. The boss's public email address has been posted online for years, and we get everything - EVERYTHING - that you could imagine. THe funny thing is, none of it affects anyone else in the office except me. No one sees any of that spam, and it doesn't hurt our office in any real way. However, all that spam DOES hurt our constituency.
You see, knucklehead, when we get three or four legitimate constituent emails a day for help, with legislative ideas, or honest & valid complaints about some branch of our sprawling gov't - we can't get to them! It takes me an hour every day of sitting in front of a computer screen deleting spam - and the result is that is an hour that constituents DON'T GET SERVED.
All that spam does is take away from other constituents! You are screwing your neighbors out of the service they are entitled to. You subvert the ability an elected official has to serve the people he or she represents. In the long run, the little things that the OFfice of So-and-So does for people in a community don't make a huge political impact. But when you need a new medi-Care card, or the DMV is hassling you, or a city is using an ordinance improperly, or a million other things - think about what it takes for you to get help from people sworn to do so. Don't piss in the well you might be drinking from someday.
It seems to me that OSS (and in particular software under the GNU license) exists to let people who want to mess around with software code do just that. Making money off of OSS is, in this sense, an issue unrelated to the production of OSS.
/. article has too much to do with human insticts, and little to do with the production of OSS.
Open Source Software is supposed to be messed with and exploited by anyone who cares to do so, isn't it? I don't think that for-profit businesses/corporations/etc. should be unfairly penalized for doing what anyone else has the right to do.
Looking at these profit-making enterprises and thinking, "Gee, why do they make money and not spread it around to those who made the software?" runs counter to the philosophy most OSS represents.
Many of the people who make OSS do so for all kinds of private reasons (like for fun) - only some of them get paid to do it. If this is viewed as the default state of OSS, then why are those who wouldn't get paid anyway now perceived to be losing out? I think that this
Let people do what they want with the software. The government already makes allowances for non-profit organizations to get $. Turn an OSS project into a non-profit and voila, a charity that a profit-making enterprise can donate to, that will simultaneously make their web-servers (or whatever) better.
As a part of my job, I have been visiting schools in a pretty large district located in Southeast Los Angeles. I always ask the principal of the school I'm visiting what they need funding for the most, and usually their first answer is "technology". They always offer up so example of how technology is great, and it helps kids, and they mention the "amazing" power point presentations, or the "wonderful" iMovie films they edited. I believe that most of the criticism leveled against technology in schools in the S.F. chronicle article is very well founded.
Using a kids version of Powerpoint does not do much for a room full of schoolchildren.
I always ask the principal about the special things they do to make sure kids learn to read, or pass whatever standardized testing controls their funding. Invariably, they always talk about the positive effects of more one on one face time with kids having trouble in certain subjects - by taking kids out of class for an hour of tutoring in reading or math, or by having them stay afterschool an hour. None of the schools I visit ever have music programs, or dance programs. They can't afford to hire a new teacher, they need bathrooms that work, etc.
For as little computers do for kids in a classroom, their capital costs are incredibly high.
Which isn't to say that someday, or in some capacity, computers will truly serve an invaluable role in the education of our young. Their high costs, in an industry that is always cash strapped (at least in Southern CA) and whose staff and faculty are largely non-technically inclined, make them a poor purchasing choice for schools.
As a sidenote, I find it a little ironic that the S.F. Chronicle article spends a paragraph or two bashing attempts to objectively measure student/school performance - but then later on in the article points to a "100-point" jump in test scores as a sign that a non-computer learning program is doing well. They can't have it both ways. Attempts to objectively measure school performance have flaws, and are thus practically unusable, or they aren't. This sort of writing makes for a poor version of objectivity.
I worked on an archaeological survey last summer and constantly wondered why my crew of about a dozen or so people was hired in the first place to survey the land. We had to hike to previously "found" sites and use a bunch of pretty unimportant measures of erosion, vegetation cover, as well as photograph and map sites. It was all circa 1920's technology (with the exception of our GPS's), and the data we colleted was very questionable (like the slope of cliff sides and the soil content). The work we did took about three months, and we only covered a tiny part of the national park we worked in.
/. post wanted suggestions about what this could be used for:
I remember talking with one of the crew members about all of this stuff. He had worked on survey teams for about 20 years and he agreed that there were better ways to get things done. He pointed out that a pilot in a prop airplane equipped with some sort of high grade photography equipment (that would let you take infrared and other sorts of photographs) could do all of our work in less than a week. Those photos coupled with already established means of having computers analyze photos could give us extremely accurate data on soil content, vegetation cover, slope, site size, etc. He said that, unfortunatley, it is extremely expensive to do this as well (it could be done with satellites, but we did't have access to satellites that would give us the resolution we needed).
So our conversation moved on, and I wondered about a more human scaled flying baloon-digital- photography idea. He mentioned a friend of his in grad school who had tried this, and had basically been rejected by his faculty for trying such things.
This article shows that we weren't the only ones thinking about this sort of thing. It's too bad that the invention of a technology does not always lead to its widespread use. But since the
Survey Archaeology.
This is just nit-picking, but the Egyptian pyramids did have a function(s). It is of course hard to know exactly, but there are a lot of really good educated guesses.
One that comes to mind, is that of a market-place - in front of pyramids, business took place.
Also, the pyramids were built by a permanent and a seasonal labor force from all around the region. Using communal labor, they literally served as a means of defining the Egyptian state. The hierarchy, labor, and sharing of resources involved in construction gave what could have been (and sometimes were) warring factions a larger political shape.
I think I agree with your idea, in that one cannot, say, thresh wheat faster with a pyramid. So in a strictly engineering sense, you are right. But the word "function" is a loaded term when it comes to describing the history and works of humankind (just read some "Functionalist" anthropology/sociology papers - the same term means a dozen different things). Just my 0.02.
I have a feeling that your post assumes that a specific material form implies a "technology" exists. In fact human history is littered with things like these crude batteries. It is obvious to you and me that they are not batteries in the sense we use them today.
However, if their structure and remains suggest they were constructed to hold an electric charge using volumes of intentionally mixed chemicals - what is there to deny? Give your ancestors a break. Much of what makes a technology has little to do with the inherent properties of the device itself, and a lot to do with the environmental and social economy around it.
A recent, and very popular, book was recently published by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs and Steel. If you are insterested I guarantee it will change your mind about being so sceptical about the inventions of humans in the past.
No one will read this post (seeing as how it is so late in the game on /. - at the bottom of the page, with almost 400 other posts ahead of it), but I'd like to add my opinion to the mix all the same.
I just spent about an hour reading the paper that Slate reported on here. Likewise, I just spent fifteen minutes reading the +5 posts here. Almost nobody who got moderated up has anything worthwhile to say about the actual paper or topic. Posts are either "Nascar sux0rz" or "a primer in game thoery" (from a mouth breathing k5-er no doubt).
David Ronfeldt (the paper's author) appears to be a well read, and well researched writer on the topic of game theory. He also appears to be a knowledgeable fan of NASCAR racing. I just wish that he had put his modified prisoner's dilemma diagram at the front of his paper! This "main point" was a long time coming in the paper. Having read my fair share of Game Theory papers, I can vouch for the value that readers place on brevity. Likewise, it would have been helpful if the "draft-line" metaphor had been more thoroughly threshed out mathematically.
Looking at his diagram, it seems as though Ronfeldt may have found a metaphor sufficient for explaining the outcomes and impulses of actors in this modified Prisoner's Dilemma. I don't feel that there is much more value than that in this paper.
get your ass out to your local bars and clubs, and support local music!!!
Just like in Command and Conquer Generals, there is a counter to your unit/argument. The counter is:
"Local Music" often sucks a fat dong.
Although it isn't much of one, there is still a marketplace of musical acts/performers/whatever in the U.S. I can attest to the local bars around my house having a TON of shitty bands that I wish would go away. Perhaps it's that artificial pop feeds back into our authentic personal narratives, or it could just be that all the good artists DO get signed eventually, but most of the people who I would "support" by getting drunk at local bars don't deserve to play an instrument, especially not one that is amplified.
Anyway, supposing that there is some sort of indigenous (is that the right term?) music that speaks to you, I guess you're right. But honestly, that Doors cover band, Krstyl Shit, playing at the Local Turtle Races and Mechanical Bull Riding Bar Nearest You, prolly really suck;).
Yes, it's "evolutionarily invisible" in a biological sense, but certainly need not be in a cultural/technological sense.
I think that you have made my point for me. The article that this is based on has to do with a gene being discovered that is related to the capacity for speach. Literally, a physical, chemical, peice of human DNA. If you are advocating this guys mushroom argument by stating that it is invisible to genetic evolution, then we don't really have much to furiously reply to each other about do we? The notion that our ancestors ingested all sorts of mind altering things (a tradition carried out today) cannot explain the selection for genes in our entire species that facilitate modern human behavior.
Modern humans, with their mental capabilities, are a very different thing from most animals, inasmuch as we do not so much evolve new capabilities biologically, as develop them technologically. This occurs through a different kind of evolutionary process, one which depends upon communication and common understandings that lead others to derive improvements.
Look, I'm sorry for being so antagonistic, but the above isn't really true. While I will admit that I believe that humans can pass on traits to each other through teaching/communication/writing this does not remove us from the natural processes of evolution.
Yet, I think it is pretty clear that while humans have been pretty much genetically the same for tens of thousands of years, it is only in the last few thousand that such things as agriculture and modern social organizations developed. Why?
First, it is important to note that a lot of animals on earth have been "genetically the same" to the same degree that humans have been over the past couple of thousand years. Second, there is a lot of active debate and research into the origins of agriculture - the least likely of scenarios being that we have a specifically developed brain/psychology for agriculture (or any specific type of technology or subsistence strategy) brought about by the use of psychedlic plants. Third, social organization can be more effectively described as arising out of a whole host of things external to human biology (population pressure, scarcity, resource density, etc.).
The original post I responded to is obviously a mindless agenda. Take a look at the advocacy pages for his view point. Their ignorance of the history human species is not my fault.
With your bachelor's degree in Anthropology, nobody should doubt that you know precisely how cultures did or did not evolve.
As a matter of fact, my bachelors degree in Anthropology allows me to know a LOT of things. For instance, it exposes your ignorance of the history anthropology, human history, and game theory. I could write a long screed about all of these things, but why waste my time and yours? If you are hung up on a term as vague as "culutres", and presuppose that Anthropology purports to describe the evolution of these things, then there is little to be gained in me going off on things way over your head.
What is culture supposed to be anyway? A set of behavioural traits that a group of human beings express? The "Food, Music, Music, Language, World-View, etc, etc. etc" of people?
It is obvious that "culture" is a term like "art" or "music" that performs a function in describing something, but doesn't convey some sort of natural division in the world. It is loaded with historic meanings that are often at odds with each other. Where does evolution and natural selection play into any of this?
Besides, if you are talking about a group of humans as being a unit of natural selection, then you are badly mistaken.
I cannot believe that this has been modded up to 5, Informative. Our ancestors ate magic mushrooms and so developed a capacity for language and sophisticated technology?! Please!
I didn't go to grad school, but I did get a bachelors degree in Anthropology - and I like to think that I am pretty well read in the field. I can guarantee that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence linking proto-humans, or physically modern humans, to any sort of psychedelic chemical that facilitated brain development. The material evidence does not exist.
Further, I don't see how a single class of substances can be linked to brain development. There are a whole host of chemicals in the human body, the consumption of which is evolutionarily invisible. Why should magic mushrooms be so special?
This post, and this theory, sound more like an attempt to fit any Associated-Press level ideas to a world-view that embraces drug use. Anthropology has been littered with things like this for generations (e.g. social darwinism, innate criminality, race, skull volume=intelligence, aquatic evolution, and the list goes on). I say, take your agenda elsewhere.
Have I been waiting for this day on Slashdot!
I know that this won't get modded up. First it is an anti-space exploration post (i.e. flamebait). Second, there are over 700 other posts out there - good luck moderators.
Anyway...
Here is the next direction NASA should take into space: they shouldn't send humans into it!
It is expensive.
It is dangerous.
It achieves little but inspiration for powerless/low social status techno-geeks.
Instead, our country should explore alternatives that advance science and technology as much as NASA uplifts our geeky spirits. There is, to my mind, only one true alternative to the wasteful, and hardly economically viable model of space exploration we currently have. That alternative is to explore and study the OCEAN.
Obviously, satellites, and mechanized thingamajigs belong in our country's arsenal of neato-exploration-based stuff. Their practical benefit is a widely heralded success.
However, the economic reality of sending people hurtling into the upper atmosphere and beyond, for a dubious "scientific" cause of "jus' cuz we can" is one that our country (and that no country on earth) can accept.
An intensive study of the ocean, based on the same sorts of ideas that NASA uses to explore space would yield inumerable direct benefits to commerce, defense, and concomitant scientific progress. Further, in terms of inspiring geeks, I can think only of the CS majors at my coastal university who I see walking alone on the beach, looking out to sea for answers. If we as a nation decide that our tax money ought to be spent in beneficial research and exploration into new frontiers, then, lone geeks on the beach everywhere, the ocean has the answers waiting for you.
A PC with a backpack.
This whole thing will read pretty poorly. Sorry about that, it's just hard to contain my thoughts after reading so many posts!
Here's my two cents:
I read through a lot of +3-5 posts, and I saw a bunch of stuff pointing to rising rates of Bad Things in countries (AUS, UK) that have tried to limit firearms in some way. It makes sense that evidence of this kind is often quoted, the only problem is that it is used by different sides for different reasons - it makes it hard to trust. Personally, I don't think that gun ownership rates play the most significant part in gun related deaths - which seems to me to be the real issue at hand when NJ, or any other gov. tried to regulate guns.
Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" had a pretty interesting idea: that gun related deaths are high in the U.S. because we have a society that primarily sees guns as a means of *defense* against other people (namely, the defense of upper middle class and rich - generally white - people from others who are disenfranchised/poor/ and prolly black).
As I mentioned before, there is a lot of article quoting about rising or falling Bad Things due to gun legislation on both sides of this issue. I think that arguments of this type rely too heavily on the idea that each nation represents a sort of "natural experiment". Perhaps this is not the best way to analyze the problem.
I am always reminded of knives when the gun debate arises. Knives are also used for killing (albeit anachronistically nowadays). They are in great abundance. There is most definitely a history of people impaling each other on Sharp Things, that could easily extend to knives in the present day. They do constitute a physical threat. Why not arm your home with knives if you're so afraid of being invaded? Or build a barricade. Pallisades. Gates, turrets, nests,fox holes. The idea that one lives in a large, civilized, modern, nation-state yet one must still own and religiously maintain a means of personal self defenseseems to me to be the height of hypocrisy, or simply a state of affairs that cannot exist. What kind of nation do you want to live in? One where you live in constant fear of home invasion (with guns or without)? Personally, I say get rid of the fear of being assainated by the bogey man, and THEN you can start talking about whether or not it is okay to own guns/force people to own crippled guns.
want hot grits?
I know that this sort of testimonial is sort of worthless in a forum like this, but I have been using hotbot all afternoon (since this story was published on /.) and I'm using Mozilla 1.1 for Windows 98 (on an ancient k6-3+ proc.). I haven't noticed any clunkiness whatsoever. Every page render I've done has been exceedingly fast actually. No crashes either. Perhaps you have a different metric for slow and clumsy?
I know that what you are saying is a joke, and it is funny, but what is so wrong with exploring the ocean? There are tons of practical applications, awe inspiring sights, and places for a human to go that have never been seen before in the seas of our planet. We've already been to the freakin moon! But no one has been to the bottom of the marianas trench.
It would be an honest *progression* to invest in sea exploration rather than space exploration.
Hey I think that we all need to lighten up on Hansolosan. I think it is quite a feat that he typed that whole statement with his head that far up his ass.
Plus, the RIAA are the government - after all don't they get our "sales tax" every time we buy a cd? Hello? Habla usted engles?
Please cease trolling on slashdot, trying to pick apart the concerned comments of the captain of a local buttpirate ship, mutzinator! Your hateful bile will surely come back to haunt you in days to come as you struggle to turn in late assignment after late assignment!!
three words:
deep sea exploration.
If the issue is that NASA generates billions of dollars towards research into novel technologies, and supporting scientists, just about any sort of field will do: the study of breakfast cereal, exploration of the insides of trees, dirt moving, anal spelunking.
After years of NASA launching various types of protoplasm into high orbit, I think that the benefits of the practice are yet to be seen. If anything, humans, and other sorts of animals, being shot into space has been proven to be a monumental waste of time, money, and imagination.
Why not focus on sending people to the bottom of the ocean? If anything, this sort of pointless exploration might actually yield some sort of useful benefits to humans traveling in the sea - an act which takes place millions of times daily. Plus, and I think this is the most fundamental reason that sea exploration is better than space exploration:
deep sea pr0n
ahh Herr Rommel, how mistaken you are. There is a large body of evidence that in terms of big and dead, there are quite a few things that the ocean has to offer americans.
Take for instance these all american types.
What is the big deal with space exploration? Doesn't it strike anyone here as an enormous waste of money? I hear freak-o right and left wingers bring up a lack of funding for different social programs all the time - but everyone seems to think it is okay to waste BILLIONS of dollars on space stations. What is the point?
I can think of two, and neither are that good.
1)Space exploration (generally) funds allsorts of useful research into to fields/materials that provide a benefit to everyone. A good example of this is something like velcro, or the use of upper atmosphere satellites to monitor weather.
A good counter to this argument is that this sort of research isn't limited to just space exploration. If we wanted to benefit a great deal of people with research in materials and natural laws we could do so without the monumental waste of money that accompanies hurling some yutz into orbit in a mechanical womb.
2)Space exploration inspires us/helps us dream/blah/blah/blah.
This appeal to our "imagination" is so bogus that it gives me a headache just thinking about it. LSD inspires people - but those that produce it don't receive billions in government funding. Likewise, if inspiration was the point of space exploration - why couldn't we just shift focus to something other than some anthrpoid peering out of a tiny window high in orbit around Mars? The government could hire fleet of advertisers to inspire us - think of all the Nike campaigns that try to get us to feel like athletes just because we wear some flimsy shoes.
The benefits of having NASA around are negligible when confronted with the realtiy of the costs to our society as a whole. We could try and tackle much more difficult feats of technical sophistication and social benifit if we redirected funds into something else.
Sorry that thisis a rant, but i just get tired of incessant boosterism for something that is so truly unimportant to the betterment of the condition of humankind (and NO eventual coloniozation of other planets will not relieve problems on earth - those problems arise out of our humanity and natural facts like scarcity).
(p.s. sorry about any typos)
Maybe if so many script kiddies/ warez'ers/ napsterites hadn't gone so fscking overboard downloading/spamming/sharing, the legislations wouldn't have any backing.
But, unfortunately, the masses found out, and spoiled for the rest of us.
It is debatable whether or not people have actually "stolen" anything by downloading/spamming/sharing, etc. Most peoples' intuition with respect to theft relies on a material object being taken. It is debatable whether or not copying a piece of information (in the most general of cases) and disseminating it (without the consent of it's author, and with/without payment in exchange) should be a crime in the first place. It so happens that theft in the physical world of objects and property works to the disadvatage of many people - and so it is rightfully considered "theft". However, it remains to be shown whether or not some civilization-wide practical disadvantage comes about through unauthorized, unpaid for, file copying and sharing.
Before blaming "the masses", maybe one should look at whose interests are being served - who is ruining what? Is it the case that downloading this stuff creates a horrible problem for our society? Or is it the case that it does nothing, or possibly makes things better?
What was ruined? If you are referring to your ability to download copyrighted material, then the blame lands squarely on the legislators who wrote the laws, the courts who upheld them, the police who enforced them, and the companies and individuals who lobbied/paid for this legislation.
Microsoft does not make a profit off of it's product sales. It offers its employees shares (to reduce their labor costs), it receives tax breaks from the government, and using cooked books to report false profits it issues stocks that are pumped on MSNBC and other news networks business shows. Microsoft is, in essence, a big pyramid scheme. It does not exist to make a profit by selling software, it exists to perpetuate itself.
Here's Bill Parish's report on the issue (circa 1999):
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html