The bedrock argument of the modern economic system is contained within a famous sentence by economist Baron Lionel Robbins in his 1932 essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science - "Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." Scarcity is what is supposed to give a commodity value, and is a bedrock reason for most of the structures of our economic system and against the socialist ideas which were prevalent at the time - a commodity either belonged to me or you, it couldn't belong to both of us. Only one of us could have it, and who would use it to greater utility?
Of course, in our modern world, our system of economic production is changing. Mechanization and biotechnology has caused the percentage of people working on farms to drop from over 70% of the population 150 years ago, to less than 3% nowadays. And the actual farm workers average less than $9 an hour pay - the money in agriculture moved away from the farm a long time ago, but it has since moved from mechanization and manufacturing like John Deere, to biotech like Monsanto. Yet the US grows more food than ever before, and is even a net exporter in agriculture. Again scarcity falls away - once the research is done, duplication of the end product costs next to nothing.
With how economics has been discussed in our institutions for over a century, there is really no economic argument for why books, DVDs and other media should not be copied once the initial commodity containing them is sold. It is only by going back to the older economic arguments of the labor theory of value, the idea of Adam Smith, and David Ricardo, and the classical economists, that this makes any sense. If a commodity is valuable due to the labor embedded in it, and not due to its inherent scarceness, then yes, your idea that it there is some problem with it, a "moral" one you say, makes sense. That commodities have value due to the labor used to make them is the bedrock of Marx's analysis of capitalism - he took the analysis of Benjamin Franklin, Ricardo, Say, Malthus, Adam Smith and so forth and added his own interpretation to their work. In many ways the modern hegemonic discarding of all of their ideas of the labor theory of value is a reaction to Marx.
Our modern economic arrangements, where it is said it is best that almost all capital be in the hand of a few capitalists, and that government's role in the economy be small, and that social programs be discouraged and so forth is all built on a bedrock of economic arguments of scarcity. You can not just say you have some funny feeling there is a moral problem with sharing a commodity since the arguments for all of these things is built on the concept that commodities are scarce - that is a bedrock economic argument of a capitalist economic system. If you accept the arguments for our economic system, then sharing a commodity you bought with millions of others is not "wrong". if you feel that there is some moral issue with it, or that there is some economic unfairness to it, then you are saying commodities are worth something not due to scarcity but due to the labor embedded within them. But then this knocks out the pillars of argument of justification for our modern economic system. Such things as policemen forcibly ejecting families from their homes, due to lack of money to pay rent, because the person lost their job in a Michigan factory, because the profit rate of the factory owner had gone down due to a world overproduction of commodities - this would be unforgivably cruel and have lost whatever piece of justification it had if we were had elements of a post-scarcity economy where value from what used to be called commodities had value in them due to the labor embedded within them.
I wish I better at explaining these economic issues to layman. But the arguments the RIAA/MPAA MAFIAA make against file sharing are truly anti-capitalist arguments. They are trying to have their cake and eat it to. I wi
"I want to get a CS degree from an accredited school (a BS, that is), but I have no interest in wasting any of my precious time taking classes in English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like. While these fields are useful and perhaps enriching, they will not contribute to making me better at my job."
I bet to differ, especially with English. Just look through Slashdot threads and see all the misspellings (which should not even be there with modern inline spell-checkers), poor grammar, paragraphs without logical structure and so forth. Most IT people have a deficit in English and should have studied it more. Trying to wiggle out of even the very minimum they're required to know does not seem the correct course.
I have been working in IT for 15 years. 99% of the technical stuff I do at work is brain dead simple no matter how much I'm paid. The bigger the company, the simpler my technical work usually is. I don't really see how replacing a course which teaches you how to write clearly with an advanced theory of computation course is going to help you. In fact, part of my theory of computation course's final exam was writing an essay.
People who think all they need to get ahead is good technical skills always perplex me. I guess that's why Steve Wozniak is richer than Steve Jobs, right? Universities, and the place who hire university graduates, have been around for a long, long time, and I'll go with their judgement about what is important in the work world over someone who wants to skip out of his English classes for yet another CS class.
The predecessor to the golden age of hacking revolved mostly around Bell and phreaking. Some of the phreaks were blind. Abbie Hoffman was involved with a magazine called YIPL (Youth International Party Line) which later became TAP. TAP had meetings in New York City. Phreaks from around the country used to call each other, and have conference calls and the like. In the Bay Area were people like Captain Crunch, and even Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built blue boxes (they even credit doing this with helping the invention of Apple)
The golden age started around 1977. In 1977 the TRS-80, the Apple ][ and Commodore PET were all released. In 1978 the Hayes modem began being produced on a mass scale (followed soon by Novation's CAT). By 1980 there were BBSs like 8BBS which were open to the nascent hacker culture (it was raided by the FBI in 1982), and this culture could be seen on Modem Over Manhattan in 1981 and after. There were other hacker BBSs like OSUNY around in 1982. There were also overlooked hacker discussions on Micronet/Compuserve and The Source. Then in 1983, WarGames was released around the time news of the 414 busts were hitting major newspapers. You also had computers like the VIC-20 that could attach to a TV selling for less than $100, with a modem for less than $100, allowing many people to afford to buy these things. So you have an influx of kids onto BBSs, in a young culture which was full of discussions of WarGames and the 414's, with some older, semi-radical technicians who knew about mainframe systems thrown in the mix. You began to have magazines like 2600 in 1984, Phrack in 1985. TAP meetings in the early 1980s gave way to 2600 meetings. Summercon began in 1987.
What happened is what happens with many movements. It began to get more organized, into sophisticated groups (LoD, MoD, L0CK, Phonemasters, The Posse - not to mention European groups like 8lgm and the people around the CCC, Hack-tic etc.) who eventually gained effective remote control of core Internet pillars (Internic, major gateways like MAE-West, corporate computers of Cisco etc.), as well as x.25 (Tymnet, Sprintnet), Baby Bell computers (COSMOS to SWITCH/FOMS, SARTS, TIRKS etc.).
The consensus seems to be this ended in 1995, not with a bang but a whimper. The rise of the Internet killed it off. There are a few reasons for this. One is some hackers or hacker groupies started making a lot of money working for start-ups (a lot meaning hundreds of millions, to less than that). Another is the old BBS culture was killed off and replace by the Internet. It used to be there were thousands of BBSs in kids homes, and then other dialups, the mainframes, that the kids would go raid. It was Manichaeism - the hacker network of BBSs where hackers would talk and go raid mainframe (or x.25) dialups, and on the other side the corporate mainframes, totally closed off, with all of the data and so forth. The Internet blended this all together - our network of our own private BBSs disappeared, and suddenly corporations opened up their computers to a large extent via web pages. Changes in production affected relations of production.
Hacking did not completely stop in 1995, but you have nothing like what existed then now - a network of technologically sophisticated groups who shared information and techniques, who had the capability to get into virtually any system. It's possible things could get to that point again, but I haven't seen sign of it. And it is hard to have the network of people necessary to do something like that and keep it completely secret.
Some people here are saying Kaczynski is not psychologically competent. At the trial he was found to be competent by the government psychiatrist, if he were not found so he would not be in jail but a mental institution. Not that psychology is a real study outside of the biological portion (and a very small subset of social scientific experiments) anyhow.
Everybody who doesn't agree with the dominant power structure in the US, imperialistic capitalism, and the culture around it, is ultimately "insane". Sane is increasing the control of capitalism and its technology even more - leading to ever-increasing global warming, alienation and isolation, video cameras and the like everywhere and an increasing 1984 surveillance state etc.
Kaczynski got a PHd and was considered something of a math genius. He didn't like the rat race so he moved off to live in a rural area. So did J. D. Salinger and so have others. He just wanted to be left alone in the wilderness, not to be a puppet of modern wage slavery and capitalism, but capitalism's need to valorize itself necessitated the forests of Montana to be cut down, for airplane's traffic to increase more and more over his home and the like. So he mailed out bombs to a Commentary and Weekly Standard writer like David Gelernter, United Airlines president Percy Wood, a Burson-Marsteller executive like Thomas Mosser , timber lobbyist Gilbert Murray and so forth. These people are backed by the violent authority of the corporate-runned state so that they can exploit workers, dominate people and the like, Kaczynski simply used violence against the people he felt (rightly) were trying to interfere and dominate him, backed by the violent authority of the state.
The idle class elite is having the US government kill working people in Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan and a host of other countries on a daily basis. This is considered good, sane and normal. Kaczynski knocking back at those he felt were forcibly dominating him is considered criminal and insane. Well, I guess its like that old St. Augustine story, the difference between a pirate and emperor is the size of his fleet. Predator drone attacks killing civilians weekly in Pakistan and Afghanistan is OK, Kaczynski maiming miserable pricks like Gelertner, and sleazy PR and corporate executives is "horrible".
One interesting note is why stopped. What happened is he found out there were others who believed as he did. In fact they were even more radical, although less militant. Kaczynski just wants to roll back the powers of the ruling class that have been gained since the Industrial Revolution, John Zerzan wants to roll back before the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago. While Kaczynski never went that far in ideology, he was certainly more militant than any of these people. I guess the logging and airline companies picked the wrong guy to log around and fly over.
Personally, I don't think Kaczynski is that great of a writer, you're better off reading some other primitivist literature to get an idea of what they're about. Much of it is by primitivists for primitivists, so even then it can be unintelligible if you're not steeped in it. Zerzan went from the 1960's Marxist left to a rejection of Marxism and into primitivism and anarchism. So you kind of need to be familiar with much of the Marxist canon, as well as the anarchist and primitivist canon, to really understand what he is saying. And how many people have that? Thankfully, *you* are a normal American, paying taxes so Predator drones can go kill people in rural Asia, not a crazy like Kaczynski who just wanted to live in the woods in peace.
I have looked at job listings over the years on Monster.com, Hotjobs and Craigslist. Many have said "Bachelors in Computer Science" required. I applied for a nice position at Google once and the HR girl told me that almost all of the people working in that position at Google had a Masters, if not a Doctorate. Even on interviews for jobs that didn't say Bachelors required, Human Resources would ask me for my education background, how many credits at college I had, if and when I planned on graduating and so on - from their questions and reactions, it was clear they would have liked to see a Bachelors.
I just took a list at Craigslist, and a number of adds said "BSCS required" and the like, go look yourself. What does that mean? It means when if things get shaky at your company and the economy gets shaky and you're applying for jobs, that's a job you can't apply for. Well you can apply, but they've said up front they don't want you.
You're right that there are bad schools and bad professors and bad textbooks - so go to a good school. Find out which professors are good via ratemyprofessors, internal school rankings and the grapevine.
I also think there is an inherent worth to four (or more) years study of computer science that four years of reading books on C++ is not going to get you. You lay the foundation with a study of discrete and continuous mathematics, then you study computation and complexity, as well as other topics. By the time you get to practical applications, you have a full, rich understanding of everything going on, are familiar with algorithms, data structures, machines etc. in a more complete way and so forth. You can do this study independently, but why not go to a good local public school - some of your professors will know a lot, and working with other students is helpful and you'll get a degree out of it to boot.
I don't think people unfamiliar with telecommunications realize how significant the Room 641A revelation was. Before the so-called Patriot Act took effect, the capability to tap all Americans phone calls and Internet traffic did not exist. Now it does - it is sitting in "points of presence" around the country - before a voice call leaves the LATA, a fiber split happens, where half your call goes to the party your calling, the other half heads to the NSA. This did not exist before 2001-2003. As far as Internet traffic, half of your packets going out and coming in go to the carriers peering point like MAE West, half go the NSA. I'm sure even an all data major carrier Internet transmission across the country splits off to one of these pipes before it goes over the high-speed continental pipeline.
Who knows about how this stuff works besides people like us and telecom people? Even this technician at AT&T didn't know exactly what was going on. Funny enough, the discovery came about because he wanted to make sure the people working in this room were working according to CWA union rules. The unions - the last remnants of ordinary worker's organization and input into a company, which is now almost totally under the control of the top corporate management and ownership, and apparently, the government and its spy agencies.
As far as people saying this is to keep Americans safe from foreign terrorists - is that why Nixon had his guys break into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate? Is that why Clinton had the FBI send him various political opponents files, or Sandy Berger was sneaking documents out of the National Archives? Or why Martin Luther King had his rooms bugged by the FBI, when what he wanted was to non-violently work for the right to vote - a right blacks theoretically had under the Constitution? In 2006 a movie called "The Lives of Others" came out, condemning the Stasi in communist East Germany for creating a police state. While American critics feel good about themselves condemning the apparatus of a police state from ancient history, one is growing in the phone companies of America. Before 2001-2003, the US did not have an internal Stasi-like phone system - now it does. There's no reason to be hyperbolic about it, it is just that the government and corporate telecommunications monopolies are attempting to remove a right to privacy and freedom we once had.
"The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat" -- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
This concept in the US from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s etc. that there can be a "neutral", whatever that means, middle ground point of news view - this can only exist in a country with a large middle class. When that large middle class starts disappearing (and it began disappearing in the 1970s) this concept of one America with the middle class suburban family as a standard starts disappearing as well.
What other political views do I need to hear? I am 37 years old, am in my particular social station and class, and there is nothing Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, or even Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek have to tell me. I already know what all of their positions are. It goes against my interests. To me it is sort of like betting $100 on the Red Sox and then having someone tell me I should listen to tell me why the Yankees should win the game. It is a waste of my time.
The only people I listen to on the right are people like Ron Paul, or even Alex Jones. But Ron Paul wants the US military's mission to be defending the US instead of all these foreign adventures, Alex Jones complains about how big corporations run the country - so I am listening because we are in agreement about issues like these anyhow.
There are two stories above, and the second is more silly than the first one.
Any of us who have taken a theory of computation class know about generative grammar, the Chomsky hierarchy and the like. While for our field, we're more familiar with the part of this theory that deals with regular expressions, the Church-Turing thesis, the halting problem and the like, at least we are familiar with the rules of a generative grammar, and hopefully have had at least some exposure as to its application to linguistics. The fact is that all languages follow the same rules of generative grammar. Some languages favor certain rules over others, but there are no languages that people regularly use that fall outside of the accepted rules for generative grammar. As we began seeing cave paintings, Venus figurines, and more advanced tools starting 50,000 years ago with the onset of behavioral modernity among humans, we can assume that language existed then, and we know it has existed from the time we have written records. If there is not a biological basis for language, if there is no underlying sense of rules for all human languages, why have no languages evolved outside of the framework of rules of the basic generative grammar? You have thousands of languages all over the world, in fact depending on the strictness of the definition of language, everyone speaks a different language - if you know a word your friend does not know the meaning of, and vice versa, under a strict definition, you are speaking different languages when those words are used. Why does everyone follow the same underlying grammar rules, why has no other type of language evolved over the past thousands (probably tens of thousands) of years? Everything points to a biological basis for this, and our study of Broca's and Wernicke's area in the brain, and the brain in general, and every study in every field points to the universal rules of grammar for all languages and the biological basis for this.
While there are of course minor arguments over this or that, the universal grammar of all languages and the biological underpinnings of this are accepted throughout many fields - linguistics, study of the brain and so forth. Scientists and linguists make minor challenges to various rules over the years, and some of these challenges are accepted, and the theory is slightly changed. On the other hand, every few years some scientist or linguist, or even non-scientist or non-linguist, comes out and says he has disproved the mass of knowledge accumulated over the decades and says he has discovered language is completely cultural in our tabula rasa brains. Eventually, this is always disproven. As time goes on, the cultural people chip away at the edifice of proof, but it still stands. Obviously there is some cultural influence and exchange and lineage of languages, but the underlying basis of all of this is our brain's biology.
If you go down this road, it doesn't have to be something complicated such as quantum mechanics that is understood, but could be anything. Take the existence of the city of Beijing - I have no proof it exists, people just tell me it does, and I've seen photos purportedly taken there, you could say I take the existence of it on faith.
The big difference is if I became doubtful enough, I could always visit Beijing. If I doubt the results of a scientific experiment, I can reproduce it. Reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific method. You can not reproduce magicians who supposedly walked on water, or parted seas, or turned water into wine, or resurrected people, or rose from the dead themselves. That you must take on faith.
"We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing." I disagree, in high school and then college, I had many science labs. True, we don't have the time and money to repeat every important experiment, but I've done enough to get the methodology if I want to do things myself. I learned how resistors and capacitors and breadboards and the like learned by my own experiments more than school.
Another thing is the times. In the 1930s, there were prominent left-wing scientists like Lancelot Hogben who felt it was important that working class people could understand math and science, which is why he wrote popular science books such as Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen. These were popular books among the poor, but intellectually active Jewish community who lived in the lower east side of Manhattan in the 1930s, many of whom went to CCNY and on to become scientists, mathematicians, engineers etc. In years past there was also a desire by working class people for education. I am quite confident a lot of the stuff coming out now in say biology could be written in layman's terms for popular science books and articles - and some of it is. But there is inertia on both ends - scientists are rewarded for indecipherable papers on obscure subjects and have less desire to write popular science, and anti-intellectualism is promoted among working people, in the USA anyhow.
Marvin Minsky once described how he perceived the brain's frontal lobe as solving problems - by considering problems from different viewpoints. One type of viewpoint could be rationality and the scientific method - and the corpus of knowledge built up from the basis of cogito ergo sum and the basics of math and physics. It is usually a very helpful viewpoint.
The original question is more of a social one than anything. I take classes at a college, and many professors there are familiar with complicated scientific concepts, and not only just in their own field. They don't take these things on faith, they learn them. That the average person in the US can not make heads nor tails from an integral says more about society and education than it does about faith and science. As James Watson says (paraphrasing): 'Very few Americans have rejected the theory of evolution, because very few who have been shown in detail how it works, and can show they understand what they have been taught, reject it. There are some people who know absolutely nothing about evolution and reject it, but they are rejecting something which they never knew anything about to begin with".
Of course, Americans are thrown into prison for allowing people to see foreign satellite channels, but let's not discuss that. Let's have the NASDAQ listed US Geeknet corporation news website Slashdot bash Cuba. Of course, USAID and the CIA have been trying to foment revolution in Cuba for a long time, and the US government has supported the terrorist groups that have been bombing hotels in Cuba. Meanwhile, the US tortures prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, a military base Cuba has asked leave Cuba but the US in its imperialist hubris refuses. Terrorists who bomb civilian airlines like Luis Posada Carilles walk the streets of the US freely, with his only legal problems being minor asylum discrepancies.
Also, how many cable stations in the US is English Al-Jazeera on? Talk about a corporate/government lockdown. Al-Jazeera is banned from the New York Stock Exchange floor as well for whatever reason.
What rank hypocrisy. Five Cubans who were concerned with terrorists like Carilles are locked in US jails right now. I'm sure Cuba would be perfectly willing to do a prisoner exchange. The US should free its political and free spech prisoners and stop supporting terrorists like Carilles before its corporations like Geeknet/Slashdot complain about Cuba. How is this USAID spy a spy who should be free, but the Cuban Five should be in prison. Just the arrogant imperial hubris of the US.
For my first five years or so in IT I had managers, not team leads. So I was not in competition with my boss in any real way, and I was more or less the technical lead for things.
From five years on, I have been under a lot of team leads. As they are the lead, and I am not, it is usually "their way or the highway". They ask me to do something, I spend hours (or days) on it, then I comeback and they want it done in a completely different way. Which makes me wonder why they didn't just say so to begin with and save me all that time. Also, I am in competition with them if there are layoffs or the like, so they hog the most profile, best projects and give others low-profile, less glorious work to do. On top of all of this, for the first five years of work, I could have used a team lead mentor, but five years on, I have no need for it, as I learn nothing more from them than I can learn from another co-worker. When I go on job interviews I ask who will assign my work, if they are a lead or manager or the like, if them team has a lead I am less likely to join.
"Empower your team and don't micromanage" and "Don't be a sissy...help the team prioritize work and use seniority to remove roadblocks".
This is all I need. As far as micromanaging - the two best managers I had, one I would talk to twice a day about work-related stuff - at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, the other I would talk to every few weeks about work-related stuff - the latter one was so hands-off that I would pop in of my own accord once a month and tell him what I was up to. Of course, for both of them, if something came up on their end or my end, we would talk about it. They did not micromanage, and they were the two best bosses I've had.
The other rule is more political - help us prioritize work. What, in the office politics of the company (aside from the needs to protect ourselves, and make our stuff stable) is the most important work to do? I expect managers to run interference for me. I don't want them to be insecure, incompetent boobs who get pressure from their manager, and then come in and yell at us to do whatever their manager, or some powerful manager in another group wants. They should not be a sissy. They should be confident of themselves and their abilities, and not get to be a nervous wreck by a little management pressure or small bumps along the road. As there are only 24 hours in a day, a manager's main resource is his team's time - 24 hours times the number of their team members. You can not schedule more time than that, and humans have the need to sleep and the like. A manager who says "yes" to everything his manager, and powerful managers in other groups want, and where every request is a priority, eventually can run into a situation where he has promised more than the 24*x number of hours he has to give away. People will keep asking as long as he keeps saying yes. I myself am unhappy if I'm required to work more than 40 hours a week, unless there is a crunch time or emergency or the like, which is fine from time to time. But if I am consistently working crazy hours, and where emergencies and everything becoming a priority is the norm, I'm soon looking for another job. Bad, weak managers say yes to everything, the good managers who help a company in the long terms are the ones who have the confidence to sometimes say no.
I have a certain kind of perspective on the matter, as I worked in IT from 1996 until now, but only in the past few years have I done the bulk of my work for my Bachelors.
In just the technical realm, a lot of what we learn is theoretical, but there is not a lot in the way of practically applying it. For example, I've learned a lot of Java, and have had to use it for various classes, but not once has a professor told us what "ant" is or how to use it. A lot of these kids are just doing a javac and running the program, or using Eclipse. So people who can write a proof for the Halting Problem would not know how to compile a java package. I don't think it's bad to know how to write a proof for the Halting Problem, but some basic practical stuff has not been taught to us. We haven't learned anything about revision control. Maybe you should be able to get a CS degree without knowing anything about revision control, but the assertion that such a person is not "ready to go" would be correct.
On the other side, there are practical things one learns with experience. Most of it is common sense, but experience drums the lessons into your head if you forget. Such as - if you notice there is a major problem, after checking for a few seconds if its real or not, instead of spending a few minutes trying to remedy it, you should alert your boss - "There may be some kind of big problem, I'm looking into it". That way your boss can call his boss and relay the message "There may be a problem, so-and-so is looking into it". What you don't want is for things to go down, you spend twenty minutes trying to bring it up in isolation, then your boss calls you and tells you his boss called him and asked why everything was down and he told him he didn't know. There are lots of little things that are common sense, but get drilled into your head by experience and I guess it's difficult to teach that in school.
I went to a public junior high school back in the late 1980s. There was a standard and advanced student program, I was in the advanced program. There were state exams students had to take, the scores of which would affect principals salary and career path. So my science classes were entirely focused not on us learning science, but getting us to pass these exams. In many ways we were like workers, working for free, to benefit the principal.
I got into the best magnet high schools in my city, but chose to go to the best Catholic high school in the city (which due to an endowment, was free). One reason was we did not have to take state exams. As the school was very selective, and as students scored high on the SATs and got into Ivy league schools, the school felt no need to partake in state tests (the normal Catholic high schools in the city did though). Thus we got a chance to really learn. I know many graduates who say they learned more in our high school then they did in college, and for me this is has often been the case.
While I am egalitarian, even for those who are less so, it is incredibly wasteful, for US productivity, to have the top 1% of students, which I always was on these state exams, have to do the kind of rote, teach for the test learning that the bottom 1% of students on the test take. We can be self-directed and go on a Deweyite learning curve where we would really be learning, and advancing at our own speed, not going along with everyone else and doing this rote for the test memorization.
The real truth is the Bolshevik revolution is what made schools in the US great in the 1950s and 1960s for engineering. The Russians engineers I met who came out of the USSR school systems are the sharpest I've ever met. But beyond that, advances like Sputnik scared the US in terms of falling behind the USSR educationally, so US schools had to revamp to make sure they were staying competitive to the USSR. Not that the USSR was a big threat to the US - the US GNP dwarfed Russia's in 1917, and continued to do so. But now that such threats have abided, all of these things - teach-for-the-test, closing schools, these charter schools which will soon be on a profit model and are being pushed for by the US's billionaires and the like can all come about. There are no threats to the US so dumbing down the sheeple and pouring Glenn Beck and fundamentalist religion in their minds is seen as a better course by the elites - or else they might get smart and start causing trouble like in Egypt.
For decades, the US (and Israel, and western Europe) saw Egypt as the biggest threat to their "national interests" in the Middle East. Which is why England and France attacked Egypt in 1956. Why is why Israel attacked Egypt and occupied the Sinai in 1967. Nasser was THE leading voice of pan-Arab nationalism - after all, many of the Arab states had their maps drawn by white westerners. Nasser even convinced other Arab leaders to have military alliances under joint command in battles against Israel.
Then there was a significant peace proposal from Egypt in the early 1970s to Israel and diplomatic reach to the US. This was ignored, probably to everyone's eventual detriment. Egypt began arming, while Israel was full of some hubris due to its 1967 military victory. In 1973 Egypt sent its forces to regain the Sinai and Israel did very badly, the US had to bail out Israel to a large extent. This started the OPEC oil embargo, if anyone is old enough to remember the long gas lines in the 1970s in the US.
At Camp David, Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. Egypt turned from the USSR to the USA, and has been getting about $2 billion a year from the US up until a few years ago. Usually $700 million or more of that was economic aid up until a few years ago. In 2009, economic aid went down to $200 million or so. On top of those cuts, Egypt has been hit by the world economic slowdown as well. It is also under a ruthless dictatorship that the annual $1.3 billion in US military economic aid helps prop up. How many of the 9/11 hijackers were Egyptian? A number of them - and the cleric who was behind the first WTC bombing was Egyptian as well. Many Egyptians have been unhappy with the US meddling in the country for years - and recently, that $700 million in economic aid has been cut to almost nothing just as their economy began feeling the global economic slowdown.
I have been a UNIX sysadmin for years, and have seen this at many companies. For a long time. Back in 1997 I worked at a company that had a lot of critical applications on an old, old Sun Netra. Lots of organizations have a few of these machines around - they are out of maintenance, the people who built it have left the company, it is out of warranty, and people generally don't touch them and hope they keep running. After years of meetings, presentations, budgets etc. we finally got a new machine shipped - and then a more politically connected department heard the machine had arrived, and had it stolen for their department on the day it arrived. I guess everyone thought it would be cheaper to page me in the middle of the night if the old machine failed and blame me the next day. The replacement machine being pulled is one of the main reasons I quit the company.
I worked for another company that had a lot of money, but one thing we had to deal with was printing. Print jobs would come into our machines from strange places (IBM mainframe machines, from programs that were written 40 years ago) and go out to strange places (old dot matrix printers in a field office out in some obscure city in India). Thus I was sometimes left to puzzle why some program written in PL/I, coming from a mainframe which I don't have access to, is not printing to some ancient printer in Bangalore which is hooked to some ancient PC's parallel port.
My former company from 2009 had some machines like this. Two very old Ultras running StoryServer and who knows what else. The StoryServer license had long fallen out of use, the machine firmware and Solaris OS had not been upgraded or patched for years. It sent e-mail through, for some reason, four Macintoshes. The Macs did not even run MacOS X, they were previous MacOS versions. E-mail starting with the letters A-F went to Mac1, G-M went through Mac2 etc., if a Mac crashed, mail to those letters would stop going through. The developers did not want to spend the time migrating to a new system, and I don't blame them, the oldest long-time developer there who dealt with such arcana was laid off, while the people building the latest new and shiny that the business wanted had the most secure jobs. Aside from this, we did not ever patch or upgrade our Red Hat Dell servers or firmware, we had no scheduled system downtimes etc. Our major Java application server had had its license run out. As I was leaving, the operations boss (soon to be fired) was considering not re-upping our Red Hat licenses.
If a sysadmin goes on a job interview, and is not desperate, these are the types of questions they should ask, at least on the second round of interviews. Are all of the machines, OSs and applications I'll be responsible for under license? Are they all fully patched and upgraded for firmware, OS and application on a regular basis? What is the oldest machine still under responsibility - is it older than three years? Because all servers should be phased out every three years - at the very least. Try getting Dell/HP to support a 7 year old server decently. Also, do you have scheduled downtime once a week? Meaning do you have the option of rebooting and patching your main database machine, even if it is early Sunday morning? If they want 100% uptime it would necessitate paying for the infrastructure for high availability.
Why should they spend the money when they can just call you in the middle of the night, to continue keeping it running with duct tape? Then they can blame you the next day after it broke. And you get no credit for it continually running either - the time you spend keeping it running is not counted, only time you devote to the latest shiny they want to implement. In fact, too much time devoted to keeping the machines they decided not to spend money on keeping up can cost you your job - if there's a choice between laying off the guy maintaining legacy stuff, and the guy who makes the new shiny for the business group and management and who deals with the
I use GRAMPS mainly, as all I want at this point is a GED file and an application to manipulate it. There are a bunch of web-based packages like PhpGedView out there as well but I haven't had much need for them at this point.
As far as research, Social Security Death Index, Ellis Island Records, US Censuses up until 1930 (1940 will be released on April 2, 2012), European censuses and so forth have all been useful. Ancestry.com has scanned ship manifests on it, with the names OCR'd, which was useful for me. It also had draft cards, passport applications and other things.
Records don't tell everything. I told my mother I found her mother's birth on a European census form, which said 1 month old or something. She told me that her mother's mother had a girl that died shortly after she was born, soon after which she became pregnant and had my grandmother, who got the same name as the baby who died. I had never heard about this before. If I hadn't been told that, I would assume a girl born in that year with that name would be my grandmother for sure. So family memory can often trump records. In the "Godfather Part II" the immigration officer is in a hurry and mixes up the last name and town of origin, in a few seconds with a stroke of the pen the family's name is changed. All kinds of things happen - birthdays are changed by purpose or accident, people flee Europe to avoid military draft, family memory often trumps official records.
You talk about a "mailing list posting by one person" and a "mailing list author [who] was making a total reckless claim". But there is no mailing list author, a private e-mail was sent to Theo who decided to make it public on the mailing list. One reason for the lack of proof etc. is Theo stated he had no desire to speak to Greg about this, and Theo made it immediately.
You also say this is by "some random person" but it is not, it is someone who was involved in AFAIK financing this part of OpenBSD development, and who worked at the same company as other people who have committed code to OpenBSD. A person posting anonymously here is "some random person", someone with that type of involvement with the various persons is NOT some "random person."
Posting this on Slashdot is not gross negligence at all, I am much happier to be aware of this story than not aware of it. It does not seem far-fetched to me either - it seems like DES - algorithms are put out by the government, or by government contractors which are safe for most people, but which the government can still decode. Did DES come with big warning labels, "hey, the government can decrypt this but most people can't". If DES had an unlabeled "backdoor" (of sorts), why is it so surprising there might be a backdoor of sorts here, even if it is only a few changes that make decryption of this stuff easier for the government?
On the negligence angle again, that would be more on Theo's end than anything. I'm glad Theo made this public, but I think he could have been a little more subtle, removing everyone's name from it for one thing. But that is on him, not Slashdot.
Wikipedia brings this on itself. I used to be heavily involved with Wikipedia. I think the supposed openness of Wikipedia can be deceptive. I don't really think it is as open as it appears. I know this is hard for most people to swallow, since even people who should know better don't believe it. It is more open then say, Encyclopedia Britannica, but there is an undercurrent of control there. Jimbo Wales is well known for running an Ayn Rand mailing list, Reason magazine talks about how the economist Hayek inspired Wales to create Wikipedia, which Wales has said, and so on. Of course his opinions could be held in constraint, and he obviously is not draconian about a party line he supports, but there are strings being pulled, fairly openly for anyone who pays attention.
For example, the very controversial editor JayJG did not get elected into the Arbitration Committee, too many people opposed (including me) and others got more votes - so Wales appointed him to it. Great, if you want Wikipedia to favor JayJG's line on Middle East politics, which is what he was always POV edit warring over.
Another example - look at the history of the Wikipedia Review page on Wikipedia. It was blocked from creation by the power users there, and an article could not be created until mid-2008. OK, you say it is not notable enough (although thousands of other less popular websites have articles - although Wikipedia doesn't allow you to cite other relative articles as evidence for relevancy, one of their bizarre rules of this type). Well mention of the existence of Wikipedia Review, linking to it and so forth was banned for years on the Criticism of Wikipedia page. It's a real sign of the cultishness of the admins that the Criticism of Wikipedia page forbid links, or even mention, to the most prominent forum for criticism of Wikipedia. I guess they finally relented, but by that time a lot of the critics (like me) left. Look over that page's history and the discussions and archived discussions.
These things are fairly out in the open, there are a lot of other biases that are harder to point to so obviously. I should also say that someone who spends there time editing the pages on say, quantum mechanics, may never run into these problems, and for them Wikipedia is working quite nicely. It is just when someone has perhaps a different point of view then Jimbo Wales on Ayn Rand, or on JayJG on the Middle East, and so on down the line for the rest of his lieutenants that this becomes obvious. But if one is interested, look into the JayJG Arbcom appointment, look into the blocks from mention of Wikipedia Review on the Criticism of Wikipedia page etc. As I said, there is a cultish quality to Wikipedia, I posted about this on Slashdot before and you get replies from some admins, like "You are one of THOSE PEOPLE! An ENEMY of WIKIPEDIA! A VANDAL/SOCKPUPPET/WHATEVER!" It is the same cultish thing as banning mention of Wikipedia Review that existed before - if Wikipedia is open, why are people critical of Wikipedia on Wikipedia Review considered "enemies"? I should mention I was once blocked for some hours - for criticizing Essjay, who was an administrator who lied about his credentials, and used to refer to his non-existent credentials when edit warring over different articles. This was reported in the mainstream press (about Essjay, not me). I posted to his page that he should be ashamed of himself and I was blocked by an administrator for that for 24 or 48 hours, I forget. So yes, I am one of those "vandals" who was blocked from Wikipedia.
Meanwhile, the FBI is kicking down the doors of people like this Minneapolis school teacher, old anti-war hippie from the 1960s etc. because they want the US to stop sending billions to kill people in Palestine, Colombia etc. Speaking against the empire - the only American heresy.
Of course we should mention that Hamas was funded by the Mossad originally as a bulwark against the PLO, something that mainstream sources in Israel and the US acknowledge. Israel (with help from the US) knocked out the secular, left-wing Palestinians like the PFLP, DFLP and company as that is who they have always been afraid of. So what is left but the religious nationalists? Israel prefers them in charge, as does the US. They make an easier target.
The US overthrew the secular Iranian government in the 1950s and installed a dictatorship...now the only complaint is the pro-US dictator, the Shah, who wiped out the secular left during his decades in power, is not in charge any more. Iraq had one of the few secular governments in the Middle East, and was a target of two US wars. With US troops now there, Iraq has declared itself an Islamic republic (read the constitution), something never said in Hussein's day (although he was forced to concede some of this after the First Gulf War). So the result of the invasion has been this. Also, of course, the US armed Osama bin Laden so as to overthrow the secular, communist Afghani government.
Limewire is written in Java, meaning it is portable. Limewire can download via a Bittorrent mesh of pieces, and it can also download via a Gnutella mesh of pieces, with Gnutella often able to use Tigertree hashes. So you have the best of both worlds.
I don't see what has come out that surpasses Limewire. Bittorrent is dependent on a web page for searching for files and for finding peers. DHT and Peer Exchange help in this somewhat. Bittorrent is also dependent on web pages in searching for files. Tribler, Cubit and Torrent Exchange are attempts to solve this, but nothing has come out that deals with this, while it has been OK from day one with Gnutella. Gnutella is fundamentally peer-to-peer and extensible. If something better has replaced Limewire I haven't heard of it.
Originally there was no bootstrap, but if you knew of one servent (server/client) you would send a ping and get pongs in response. This created network traffic, something Gnutella networks always try to keep to a minimum, so pings and pongs started to die out and servents would tell you of hosts through other methods - like during the initial handshake.
There have been a number of discussions of how to bootstrap. One clever program, I forget which one (Shareaza?) joined an IRC channel and servents would connect to each other. There was a webcaching scheme around for a while - some of them are still active, although it didn't really work out as they wanted.
A case in point is the article Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. She is a woman in Iran who had the death penalty charged against her. The opening paragraph mentions nothing about her dead husband. The next paragraph at one point says - 'she has since recanted the "confession" made under duress'. Note the scare quotes around the word confession, the mention it was made under duress - as if confessions in American murder cases are not made to police "under duress", whatever that is supposed to mean.
It also says "court was prosecuting one of the two men for involvement in the death of Mohammadi Ashtiani's husband". Yes "involved in the death", another way of saying murder.
The slanting of this article is incredible. If a woman in Texas had an affair with a man, a man who then murdered her husband, and months later she had been convicted under a death sentence for conspiring to murder her husband with her lover, do you think there would be anything like this in the article? Do you think maybe you wouldn't have to piece together that she was thought to be a co-conspirator in those who murdered, I mean were "involved in the death", of her husband? A cursory read of this would make one thing this woman was getting the death penalty for having an affair.
Then there's the canard - "Well, just edit it". Well, look through the history and discussion pages - people have, but their edits are reverted by the usual Wikipedia cabal. Their control of articles like this are backed up by the Arbitration Committee, and ultimately Jimbo Wales himself, whose devotion to Ayn Rand and the like are well known. Anyone with little involvement with Wikipedia might easily believe it is free and open. Even those heavily involved in uncontroversial editing of articles on science, math and the like might not see it. But a long-time observance of things is obvious. Just look at the enormously controversial and biased JayJG failing in the 2006 vote to make the Arbitration Committee - but Jimbo Wales appointing him to it anyhow. I pick that as JayJG is heavily biased against Iran. I am not Iranian, but I do find it laughable how the Americans who overthrew Mossadegh and the democratic government of Iran in the 1950s and installed a brutal dictator now whine about the Iranian government, and turn their eyes from their bloody Texan death rows to some far-off village in Iran and make some woman who conspired with her lover to murder her husband into some cause celebre.
"In addition, the curriculum of the 'Wiki-ized University' would be intellectually fluid, and instead of tenure, professors' longevity 'would be determined by the community.'"
Yes, universities want to get rid of tenure due to their desire to be "intellectually fluid". From every case I know about, universities don't want to replace long-time professors with teaching assistants (called "teaching fellows" at some places) due to desire toward being "intellectually fluid" but due to the fact that it costs a lot less for them. It is almost always about short-term budget concerns, not some goal of greater intellectual achievement
At my college, there are a few core courses which every CS student must take, and they are all taught by long-time, tenured professors. These professors have published papers, really know their stuff, and have excellent ways of teaching about backtracking algorithms, linked lists, stacks, queues and the like. In other classes we get these teaching assistants who are often going for their Masters, don't have a good grasp of the material, don't know how to teach it, and usually seem harried between their teaching and their studies. The only positive for me from my non-CS classes is some of the young, female TAs are attractive and pleasant, although often also incompetent as teachers.
Another thing that professors often mention - professors are usually not judged by how highly they are rated in teaching undergraduate classes, but by how many grants they bring in, what journals their articles get published in, and what they are doing in research with their graduate students. So if universities wanted professors to be better teachers, simply giving their teaching ability some more measure in how they stood could improve undergraduate teaching. If you're paid by publish-or-perish and your undergraduate classes count for little, who is surprised if teaching suffers? It's amazing how many professors put effort into their classes even though it does nothing for them financially.
Also, tenure has already had many nails pounded into its coffin. How many tenure-track positions are there nowadays in a department of a college? And how many classes are being taught by people not in a tenure-track position? It's cheaper for colleges to eliminate those positions, and then tell graduate students they don't have to pay tuition and will get some negligible pay to teach classes.
Despite the idea that universities are outposts of Bolshevism, I know of many, many cases of left-wing professors being booted from their colleges, who the administration tries to boot from college, or fight over tenure and so forth. Paul Wellstone, Howard Zinn, David Graeber, Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Ward Churchill, Cornel West, these names spring to mind and there have been many more. One of the ideas of tenure is to allow for a free intellectual culture where one can not be booted out of the university for their opinions. I should note that this idea arose a little over a century ago, things used to be much worse, where American scholars who said something some college donor disliked would expect to find themselves out of a job.
First, SCO released early versions of Unix to the public under a BSD-like license in 2002. So if any of that code happened to be in Linux, it is there legally. Only code added in later versions of Unix would be affected.
Secondly, a lot of code in Linux is created to follow POSIX standards. There is code in SCO Unix and Linux which looks very similar, but the source for the material is the IEEE Posix standard, not SCO Unix source code.
Slashdot Mirror
The bedrock argument of the modern economic system is contained within a famous sentence by economist Baron Lionel Robbins in his 1932 essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science - "Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." Scarcity is what is supposed to give a commodity value, and is a bedrock reason for most of the structures of our economic system and against the socialist ideas which were prevalent at the time - a commodity either belonged to me or you, it couldn't belong to both of us. Only one of us could have it, and who would use it to greater utility?
Of course, in our modern world, our system of economic production is changing. Mechanization and biotechnology has caused the percentage of people working on farms to drop from over 70% of the population 150 years ago, to less than 3% nowadays. And the actual farm workers average less than $9 an hour pay - the money in agriculture moved away from the farm a long time ago, but it has since moved from mechanization and manufacturing like John Deere, to biotech like Monsanto. Yet the US grows more food than ever before, and is even a net exporter in agriculture. Again scarcity falls away - once the research is done, duplication of the end product costs next to nothing.
With how economics has been discussed in our institutions for over a century, there is really no economic argument for why books, DVDs and other media should not be copied once the initial commodity containing them is sold. It is only by going back to the older economic arguments of the labor theory of value, the idea of Adam Smith, and David Ricardo, and the classical economists, that this makes any sense. If a commodity is valuable due to the labor embedded in it, and not due to its inherent scarceness, then yes, your idea that it there is some problem with it, a "moral" one you say, makes sense. That commodities have value due to the labor used to make them is the bedrock of Marx's analysis of capitalism - he took the analysis of Benjamin Franklin, Ricardo, Say, Malthus, Adam Smith and so forth and added his own interpretation to their work. In many ways the modern hegemonic discarding of all of their ideas of the labor theory of value is a reaction to Marx.
Our modern economic arrangements, where it is said it is best that almost all capital be in the hand of a few capitalists, and that government's role in the economy be small, and that social programs be discouraged and so forth is all built on a bedrock of economic arguments of scarcity. You can not just say you have some funny feeling there is a moral problem with sharing a commodity since the arguments for all of these things is built on the concept that commodities are scarce - that is a bedrock economic argument of a capitalist economic system. If you accept the arguments for our economic system, then sharing a commodity you bought with millions of others is not "wrong". if you feel that there is some moral issue with it, or that there is some economic unfairness to it, then you are saying commodities are worth something not due to scarcity but due to the labor embedded within them. But then this knocks out the pillars of argument of justification for our modern economic system. Such things as policemen forcibly ejecting families from their homes, due to lack of money to pay rent, because the person lost their job in a Michigan factory, because the profit rate of the factory owner had gone down due to a world overproduction of commodities - this would be unforgivably cruel and have lost whatever piece of justification it had if we were had elements of a post-scarcity economy where value from what used to be called commodities had value in them due to the labor embedded within them.
I wish I better at explaining these economic issues to layman. But the arguments the RIAA/MPAA MAFIAA make against file sharing are truly anti-capitalist arguments. They are trying to have their cake and eat it to. I wi
"I want to get a CS degree from an accredited school (a BS, that is), but I have no interest in wasting any of my precious time taking classes in English, Philosophy, History, Art and the like. While these fields are useful and perhaps enriching, they will not contribute to making me better at my job."
I bet to differ, especially with English. Just look through Slashdot threads and see all the misspellings (which should not even be there with modern inline spell-checkers), poor grammar, paragraphs without logical structure and so forth. Most IT people have a deficit in English and should have studied it more. Trying to wiggle out of even the very minimum they're required to know does not seem the correct course.
I have been working in IT for 15 years. 99% of the technical stuff I do at work is brain dead simple no matter how much I'm paid. The bigger the company, the simpler my technical work usually is. I don't really see how replacing a course which teaches you how to write clearly with an advanced theory of computation course is going to help you. In fact, part of my theory of computation course's final exam was writing an essay.
People who think all they need to get ahead is good technical skills always perplex me. I guess that's why Steve Wozniak is richer than Steve Jobs, right? Universities, and the place who hire university graduates, have been around for a long, long time, and I'll go with their judgement about what is important in the work world over someone who wants to skip out of his English classes for yet another CS class.
The golden age started around 1977. In 1977 the TRS-80, the Apple ][ and Commodore PET were all released. In 1978 the Hayes modem began being produced on a mass scale (followed soon by Novation's CAT). By 1980 there were BBSs like 8BBS which were open to the nascent hacker culture (it was raided by the FBI in 1982), and this culture could be seen on Modem Over Manhattan in 1981 and after. There were other hacker BBSs like OSUNY around in 1982. There were also overlooked hacker discussions on Micronet/Compuserve and The Source. Then in 1983, WarGames was released around the time news of the 414 busts were hitting major newspapers. You also had computers like the VIC-20 that could attach to a TV selling for less than $100, with a modem for less than $100, allowing many people to afford to buy these things. So you have an influx of kids onto BBSs, in a young culture which was full of discussions of WarGames and the 414's, with some older, semi-radical technicians who knew about mainframe systems thrown in the mix. You began to have magazines like 2600 in 1984, Phrack in 1985. TAP meetings in the early 1980s gave way to 2600 meetings. Summercon began in 1987.
What happened is what happens with many movements. It began to get more organized, into sophisticated groups (LoD, MoD, L0CK, Phonemasters, The Posse - not to mention European groups like 8lgm and the people around the CCC, Hack-tic etc.) who eventually gained effective remote control of core Internet pillars (Internic, major gateways like MAE-West, corporate computers of Cisco etc.), as well as x.25 (Tymnet, Sprintnet), Baby Bell computers (COSMOS to SWITCH/FOMS, SARTS, TIRKS etc.).
The consensus seems to be this ended in 1995, not with a bang but a whimper. The rise of the Internet killed it off. There are a few reasons for this. One is some hackers or hacker groupies started making a lot of money working for start-ups (a lot meaning hundreds of millions, to less than that). Another is the old BBS culture was killed off and replace by the Internet. It used to be there were thousands of BBSs in kids homes, and then other dialups, the mainframes, that the kids would go raid. It was Manichaeism - the hacker network of BBSs where hackers would talk and go raid mainframe (or x.25) dialups, and on the other side the corporate mainframes, totally closed off, with all of the data and so forth. The Internet blended this all together - our network of our own private BBSs disappeared, and suddenly corporations opened up their computers to a large extent via web pages. Changes in production affected relations of production.
Hacking did not completely stop in 1995, but you have nothing like what existed then now - a network of technologically sophisticated groups who shared information and techniques, who had the capability to get into virtually any system. It's possible things could get to that point again, but I haven't seen sign of it. And it is hard to have the network of people necessary to do something like that and keep it completely secret.
Everybody who doesn't agree with the dominant power structure in the US, imperialistic capitalism, and the culture around it, is ultimately "insane". Sane is increasing the control of capitalism and its technology even more - leading to ever-increasing global warming, alienation and isolation, video cameras and the like everywhere and an increasing 1984 surveillance state etc.
Kaczynski got a PHd and was considered something of a math genius. He didn't like the rat race so he moved off to live in a rural area. So did J. D. Salinger and so have others. He just wanted to be left alone in the wilderness, not to be a puppet of modern wage slavery and capitalism, but capitalism's need to valorize itself necessitated the forests of Montana to be cut down, for airplane's traffic to increase more and more over his home and the like. So he mailed out bombs to a Commentary and Weekly Standard writer like David Gelernter, United Airlines president Percy Wood, a Burson-Marsteller executive like Thomas Mosser , timber lobbyist Gilbert Murray and so forth. These people are backed by the violent authority of the corporate-runned state so that they can exploit workers, dominate people and the like, Kaczynski simply used violence against the people he felt (rightly) were trying to interfere and dominate him, backed by the violent authority of the state.
The idle class elite is having the US government kill working people in Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan and a host of other countries on a daily basis. This is considered good, sane and normal. Kaczynski knocking back at those he felt were forcibly dominating him is considered criminal and insane. Well, I guess its like that old St. Augustine story, the difference between a pirate and emperor is the size of his fleet. Predator drone attacks killing civilians weekly in Pakistan and Afghanistan is OK, Kaczynski maiming miserable pricks like Gelertner, and sleazy PR and corporate executives is "horrible".
One interesting note is why stopped. What happened is he found out there were others who believed as he did. In fact they were even more radical, although less militant. Kaczynski just wants to roll back the powers of the ruling class that have been gained since the Industrial Revolution, John Zerzan wants to roll back before the Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 years ago. While Kaczynski never went that far in ideology, he was certainly more militant than any of these people. I guess the logging and airline companies picked the wrong guy to log around and fly over.
Personally, I don't think Kaczynski is that great of a writer, you're better off reading some other primitivist literature to get an idea of what they're about. Much of it is by primitivists for primitivists, so even then it can be unintelligible if you're not steeped in it. Zerzan went from the 1960's Marxist left to a rejection of Marxism and into primitivism and anarchism. So you kind of need to be familiar with much of the Marxist canon, as well as the anarchist and primitivist canon, to really understand what he is saying. And how many people have that? Thankfully, *you* are a normal American, paying taxes so Predator drones can go kill people in rural Asia, not a crazy like Kaczynski who just wanted to live in the woods in peace.
I just took a list at Craigslist, and a number of adds said "BSCS required" and the like, go look yourself. What does that mean? It means when if things get shaky at your company and the economy gets shaky and you're applying for jobs, that's a job you can't apply for. Well you can apply, but they've said up front they don't want you.
You're right that there are bad schools and bad professors and bad textbooks - so go to a good school. Find out which professors are good via ratemyprofessors, internal school rankings and the grapevine.
I also think there is an inherent worth to four (or more) years study of computer science that four years of reading books on C++ is not going to get you. You lay the foundation with a study of discrete and continuous mathematics, then you study computation and complexity, as well as other topics. By the time you get to practical applications, you have a full, rich understanding of everything going on, are familiar with algorithms, data structures, machines etc. in a more complete way and so forth. You can do this study independently, but why not go to a good local public school - some of your professors will know a lot, and working with other students is helpful and you'll get a degree out of it to boot.
Who knows about how this stuff works besides people like us and telecom people? Even this technician at AT&T didn't know exactly what was going on. Funny enough, the discovery came about because he wanted to make sure the people working in this room were working according to CWA union rules. The unions - the last remnants of ordinary worker's organization and input into a company, which is now almost totally under the control of the top corporate management and ownership, and apparently, the government and its spy agencies.
As far as people saying this is to keep Americans safe from foreign terrorists - is that why Nixon had his guys break into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate? Is that why Clinton had the FBI send him various political opponents files, or Sandy Berger was sneaking documents out of the National Archives? Or why Martin Luther King had his rooms bugged by the FBI, when what he wanted was to non-violently work for the right to vote - a right blacks theoretically had under the Constitution? In 2006 a movie called "The Lives of Others" came out, condemning the Stasi in communist East Germany for creating a police state. While American critics feel good about themselves condemning the apparatus of a police state from ancient history, one is growing in the phone companies of America. Before 2001-2003, the US did not have an internal Stasi-like phone system - now it does. There's no reason to be hyperbolic about it, it is just that the government and corporate telecommunications monopolies are attempting to remove a right to privacy and freedom we once had.
This concept in the US from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s etc. that there can be a "neutral", whatever that means, middle ground point of news view - this can only exist in a country with a large middle class. When that large middle class starts disappearing (and it began disappearing in the 1970s) this concept of one America with the middle class suburban family as a standard starts disappearing as well.
What other political views do I need to hear? I am 37 years old, am in my particular social station and class, and there is nothing Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, or even Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek have to tell me. I already know what all of their positions are. It goes against my interests. To me it is sort of like betting $100 on the Red Sox and then having someone tell me I should listen to tell me why the Yankees should win the game. It is a waste of my time.
The only people I listen to on the right are people like Ron Paul, or even Alex Jones. But Ron Paul wants the US military's mission to be defending the US instead of all these foreign adventures, Alex Jones complains about how big corporations run the country - so I am listening because we are in agreement about issues like these anyhow.
Any of us who have taken a theory of computation class know about generative grammar, the Chomsky hierarchy and the like. While for our field, we're more familiar with the part of this theory that deals with regular expressions, the Church-Turing thesis, the halting problem and the like, at least we are familiar with the rules of a generative grammar, and hopefully have had at least some exposure as to its application to linguistics. The fact is that all languages follow the same rules of generative grammar. Some languages favor certain rules over others, but there are no languages that people regularly use that fall outside of the accepted rules for generative grammar. As we began seeing cave paintings, Venus figurines, and more advanced tools starting 50,000 years ago with the onset of behavioral modernity among humans, we can assume that language existed then, and we know it has existed from the time we have written records. If there is not a biological basis for language, if there is no underlying sense of rules for all human languages, why have no languages evolved outside of the framework of rules of the basic generative grammar? You have thousands of languages all over the world, in fact depending on the strictness of the definition of language, everyone speaks a different language - if you know a word your friend does not know the meaning of, and vice versa, under a strict definition, you are speaking different languages when those words are used. Why does everyone follow the same underlying grammar rules, why has no other type of language evolved over the past thousands (probably tens of thousands) of years? Everything points to a biological basis for this, and our study of Broca's and Wernicke's area in the brain, and the brain in general, and every study in every field points to the universal rules of grammar for all languages and the biological basis for this.
While there are of course minor arguments over this or that, the universal grammar of all languages and the biological underpinnings of this are accepted throughout many fields - linguistics, study of the brain and so forth. Scientists and linguists make minor challenges to various rules over the years, and some of these challenges are accepted, and the theory is slightly changed. On the other hand, every few years some scientist or linguist, or even non-scientist or non-linguist, comes out and says he has disproved the mass of knowledge accumulated over the decades and says he has discovered language is completely cultural in our tabula rasa brains. Eventually, this is always disproven. As time goes on, the cultural people chip away at the edifice of proof, but it still stands. Obviously there is some cultural influence and exchange and lineage of languages, but the underlying basis of all of this is our brain's biology.
The big difference is if I became doubtful enough, I could always visit Beijing. If I doubt the results of a scientific experiment, I can reproduce it. Reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific method. You can not reproduce magicians who supposedly walked on water, or parted seas, or turned water into wine, or resurrected people, or rose from the dead themselves. That you must take on faith.
"We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing." I disagree, in high school and then college, I had many science labs. True, we don't have the time and money to repeat every important experiment, but I've done enough to get the methodology if I want to do things myself. I learned how resistors and capacitors and breadboards and the like learned by my own experiments more than school.
Another thing is the times. In the 1930s, there were prominent left-wing scientists like Lancelot Hogben who felt it was important that working class people could understand math and science, which is why he wrote popular science books such as Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen. These were popular books among the poor, but intellectually active Jewish community who lived in the lower east side of Manhattan in the 1930s, many of whom went to CCNY and on to become scientists, mathematicians, engineers etc. In years past there was also a desire by working class people for education. I am quite confident a lot of the stuff coming out now in say biology could be written in layman's terms for popular science books and articles - and some of it is. But there is inertia on both ends - scientists are rewarded for indecipherable papers on obscure subjects and have less desire to write popular science, and anti-intellectualism is promoted among working people, in the USA anyhow.
Marvin Minsky once described how he perceived the brain's frontal lobe as solving problems - by considering problems from different viewpoints. One type of viewpoint could be rationality and the scientific method - and the corpus of knowledge built up from the basis of cogito ergo sum and the basics of math and physics. It is usually a very helpful viewpoint.
The original question is more of a social one than anything. I take classes at a college, and many professors there are familiar with complicated scientific concepts, and not only just in their own field. They don't take these things on faith, they learn them. That the average person in the US can not make heads nor tails from an integral says more about society and education than it does about faith and science. As James Watson says (paraphrasing): 'Very few Americans have rejected the theory of evolution, because very few who have been shown in detail how it works, and can show they understand what they have been taught, reject it. There are some people who know absolutely nothing about evolution and reject it, but they are rejecting something which they never knew anything about to begin with".
Also, how many cable stations in the US is English Al-Jazeera on? Talk about a corporate/government lockdown. Al-Jazeera is banned from the New York Stock Exchange floor as well for whatever reason.
What rank hypocrisy. Five Cubans who were concerned with terrorists like Carilles are locked in US jails right now. I'm sure Cuba would be perfectly willing to do a prisoner exchange. The US should free its political and free spech prisoners and stop supporting terrorists like Carilles before its corporations like Geeknet/Slashdot complain about Cuba. How is this USAID spy a spy who should be free, but the Cuban Five should be in prison. Just the arrogant imperial hubris of the US.
From five years on, I have been under a lot of team leads. As they are the lead, and I am not, it is usually "their way or the highway". They ask me to do something, I spend hours (or days) on it, then I comeback and they want it done in a completely different way. Which makes me wonder why they didn't just say so to begin with and save me all that time. Also, I am in competition with them if there are layoffs or the like, so they hog the most profile, best projects and give others low-profile, less glorious work to do. On top of all of this, for the first five years of work, I could have used a team lead mentor, but five years on, I have no need for it, as I learn nothing more from them than I can learn from another co-worker. When I go on job interviews I ask who will assign my work, if they are a lead or manager or the like, if them team has a lead I am less likely to join.
"Empower your team and don't micromanage" and "Don't be a sissy...help the team prioritize work and use seniority to remove roadblocks".
This is all I need. As far as micromanaging - the two best managers I had, one I would talk to twice a day about work-related stuff - at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, the other I would talk to every few weeks about work-related stuff - the latter one was so hands-off that I would pop in of my own accord once a month and tell him what I was up to. Of course, for both of them, if something came up on their end or my end, we would talk about it. They did not micromanage, and they were the two best bosses I've had.
The other rule is more political - help us prioritize work. What, in the office politics of the company (aside from the needs to protect ourselves, and make our stuff stable) is the most important work to do? I expect managers to run interference for me. I don't want them to be insecure, incompetent boobs who get pressure from their manager, and then come in and yell at us to do whatever their manager, or some powerful manager in another group wants. They should not be a sissy. They should be confident of themselves and their abilities, and not get to be a nervous wreck by a little management pressure or small bumps along the road. As there are only 24 hours in a day, a manager's main resource is his team's time - 24 hours times the number of their team members. You can not schedule more time than that, and humans have the need to sleep and the like. A manager who says "yes" to everything his manager, and powerful managers in other groups want, and where every request is a priority, eventually can run into a situation where he has promised more than the 24*x number of hours he has to give away. People will keep asking as long as he keeps saying yes. I myself am unhappy if I'm required to work more than 40 hours a week, unless there is a crunch time or emergency or the like, which is fine from time to time. But if I am consistently working crazy hours, and where emergencies and everything becoming a priority is the norm, I'm soon looking for another job. Bad, weak managers say yes to everything, the good managers who help a company in the long terms are the ones who have the confidence to sometimes say no.
In just the technical realm, a lot of what we learn is theoretical, but there is not a lot in the way of practically applying it. For example, I've learned a lot of Java, and have had to use it for various classes, but not once has a professor told us what "ant" is or how to use it. A lot of these kids are just doing a javac and running the program, or using Eclipse. So people who can write a proof for the Halting Problem would not know how to compile a java package. I don't think it's bad to know how to write a proof for the Halting Problem, but some basic practical stuff has not been taught to us. We haven't learned anything about revision control. Maybe you should be able to get a CS degree without knowing anything about revision control, but the assertion that such a person is not "ready to go" would be correct.
On the other side, there are practical things one learns with experience. Most of it is common sense, but experience drums the lessons into your head if you forget. Such as - if you notice there is a major problem, after checking for a few seconds if its real or not, instead of spending a few minutes trying to remedy it, you should alert your boss - "There may be some kind of big problem, I'm looking into it". That way your boss can call his boss and relay the message "There may be a problem, so-and-so is looking into it". What you don't want is for things to go down, you spend twenty minutes trying to bring it up in isolation, then your boss calls you and tells you his boss called him and asked why everything was down and he told him he didn't know. There are lots of little things that are common sense, but get drilled into your head by experience and I guess it's difficult to teach that in school.
I got into the best magnet high schools in my city, but chose to go to the best Catholic high school in the city (which due to an endowment, was free). One reason was we did not have to take state exams. As the school was very selective, and as students scored high on the SATs and got into Ivy league schools, the school felt no need to partake in state tests (the normal Catholic high schools in the city did though). Thus we got a chance to really learn. I know many graduates who say they learned more in our high school then they did in college, and for me this is has often been the case.
While I am egalitarian, even for those who are less so, it is incredibly wasteful, for US productivity, to have the top 1% of students, which I always was on these state exams, have to do the kind of rote, teach for the test learning that the bottom 1% of students on the test take. We can be self-directed and go on a Deweyite learning curve where we would really be learning, and advancing at our own speed, not going along with everyone else and doing this rote for the test memorization.
The real truth is the Bolshevik revolution is what made schools in the US great in the 1950s and 1960s for engineering. The Russians engineers I met who came out of the USSR school systems are the sharpest I've ever met. But beyond that, advances like Sputnik scared the US in terms of falling behind the USSR educationally, so US schools had to revamp to make sure they were staying competitive to the USSR. Not that the USSR was a big threat to the US - the US GNP dwarfed Russia's in 1917, and continued to do so. But now that such threats have abided, all of these things - teach-for-the-test, closing schools, these charter schools which will soon be on a profit model and are being pushed for by the US's billionaires and the like can all come about. There are no threats to the US so dumbing down the sheeple and pouring Glenn Beck and fundamentalist religion in their minds is seen as a better course by the elites - or else they might get smart and start causing trouble like in Egypt.
Then there was a significant peace proposal from Egypt in the early 1970s to Israel and diplomatic reach to the US. This was ignored, probably to everyone's eventual detriment. Egypt began arming, while Israel was full of some hubris due to its 1967 military victory. In 1973 Egypt sent its forces to regain the Sinai and Israel did very badly, the US had to bail out Israel to a large extent. This started the OPEC oil embargo, if anyone is old enough to remember the long gas lines in the 1970s in the US.
At Camp David, Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. Egypt turned from the USSR to the USA, and has been getting about $2 billion a year from the US up until a few years ago. Usually $700 million or more of that was economic aid up until a few years ago. In 2009, economic aid went down to $200 million or so. On top of those cuts, Egypt has been hit by the world economic slowdown as well. It is also under a ruthless dictatorship that the annual $1.3 billion in US military economic aid helps prop up. How many of the 9/11 hijackers were Egyptian? A number of them - and the cleric who was behind the first WTC bombing was Egyptian as well. Many Egyptians have been unhappy with the US meddling in the country for years - and recently, that $700 million in economic aid has been cut to almost nothing just as their economy began feeling the global economic slowdown.
I worked for another company that had a lot of money, but one thing we had to deal with was printing. Print jobs would come into our machines from strange places (IBM mainframe machines, from programs that were written 40 years ago) and go out to strange places (old dot matrix printers in a field office out in some obscure city in India). Thus I was sometimes left to puzzle why some program written in PL/I, coming from a mainframe which I don't have access to, is not printing to some ancient printer in Bangalore which is hooked to some ancient PC's parallel port.
My former company from 2009 had some machines like this. Two very old Ultras running StoryServer and who knows what else. The StoryServer license had long fallen out of use, the machine firmware and Solaris OS had not been upgraded or patched for years. It sent e-mail through, for some reason, four Macintoshes. The Macs did not even run MacOS X, they were previous MacOS versions. E-mail starting with the letters A-F went to Mac1, G-M went through Mac2 etc., if a Mac crashed, mail to those letters would stop going through. The developers did not want to spend the time migrating to a new system, and I don't blame them, the oldest long-time developer there who dealt with such arcana was laid off, while the people building the latest new and shiny that the business wanted had the most secure jobs. Aside from this, we did not ever patch or upgrade our Red Hat Dell servers or firmware, we had no scheduled system downtimes etc. Our major Java application server had had its license run out. As I was leaving, the operations boss (soon to be fired) was considering not re-upping our Red Hat licenses.
If a sysadmin goes on a job interview, and is not desperate, these are the types of questions they should ask, at least on the second round of interviews. Are all of the machines, OSs and applications I'll be responsible for under license? Are they all fully patched and upgraded for firmware, OS and application on a regular basis? What is the oldest machine still under responsibility - is it older than three years? Because all servers should be phased out every three years - at the very least. Try getting Dell/HP to support a 7 year old server decently. Also, do you have scheduled downtime once a week? Meaning do you have the option of rebooting and patching your main database machine, even if it is early Sunday morning? If they want 100% uptime it would necessitate paying for the infrastructure for high availability.
Why should they spend the money when they can just call you in the middle of the night, to continue keeping it running with duct tape? Then they can blame you the next day after it broke. And you get no credit for it continually running either - the time you spend keeping it running is not counted, only time you devote to the latest shiny they want to implement. In fact, too much time devoted to keeping the machines they decided not to spend money on keeping up can cost you your job - if there's a choice between laying off the guy maintaining legacy stuff, and the guy who makes the new shiny for the business group and management and who deals with the
As far as research, Social Security Death Index, Ellis Island Records, US Censuses up until 1930 (1940 will be released on April 2, 2012), European censuses and so forth have all been useful. Ancestry.com has scanned ship manifests on it, with the names OCR'd, which was useful for me. It also had draft cards, passport applications and other things.
Records don't tell everything. I told my mother I found her mother's birth on a European census form, which said 1 month old or something. She told me that her mother's mother had a girl that died shortly after she was born, soon after which she became pregnant and had my grandmother, who got the same name as the baby who died. I had never heard about this before. If I hadn't been told that, I would assume a girl born in that year with that name would be my grandmother for sure. So family memory can often trump records. In the "Godfather Part II" the immigration officer is in a hurry and mixes up the last name and town of origin, in a few seconds with a stroke of the pen the family's name is changed. All kinds of things happen - birthdays are changed by purpose or accident, people flee Europe to avoid military draft, family memory often trumps official records.
You talk about a "mailing list posting by one person" and a "mailing list author [who] was making a total reckless claim". But there is no mailing list author, a private e-mail was sent to Theo who decided to make it public on the mailing list. One reason for the lack of proof etc. is Theo stated he had no desire to speak to Greg about this, and Theo made it immediately.
You also say this is by "some random person" but it is not, it is someone who was involved in AFAIK financing this part of OpenBSD development, and who worked at the same company as other people who have committed code to OpenBSD. A person posting anonymously here is "some random person", someone with that type of involvement with the various persons is NOT some "random person."
Posting this on Slashdot is not gross negligence at all, I am much happier to be aware of this story than not aware of it. It does not seem far-fetched to me either - it seems like DES - algorithms are put out by the government, or by government contractors which are safe for most people, but which the government can still decode. Did DES come with big warning labels, "hey, the government can decrypt this but most people can't". If DES had an unlabeled "backdoor" (of sorts), why is it so surprising there might be a backdoor of sorts here, even if it is only a few changes that make decryption of this stuff easier for the government?
On the negligence angle again, that would be more on Theo's end than anything. I'm glad Theo made this public, but I think he could have been a little more subtle, removing everyone's name from it for one thing. But that is on him, not Slashdot.
For example, the very controversial editor JayJG did not get elected into the Arbitration Committee, too many people opposed (including me) and others got more votes - so Wales appointed him to it. Great, if you want Wikipedia to favor JayJG's line on Middle East politics, which is what he was always POV edit warring over.
Another example - look at the history of the Wikipedia Review page on Wikipedia. It was blocked from creation by the power users there, and an article could not be created until mid-2008. OK, you say it is not notable enough (although thousands of other less popular websites have articles - although Wikipedia doesn't allow you to cite other relative articles as evidence for relevancy, one of their bizarre rules of this type). Well mention of the existence of Wikipedia Review, linking to it and so forth was banned for years on the Criticism of Wikipedia page. It's a real sign of the cultishness of the admins that the Criticism of Wikipedia page forbid links, or even mention, to the most prominent forum for criticism of Wikipedia. I guess they finally relented, but by that time a lot of the critics (like me) left. Look over that page's history and the discussions and archived discussions.
These things are fairly out in the open, there are a lot of other biases that are harder to point to so obviously. I should also say that someone who spends there time editing the pages on say, quantum mechanics, may never run into these problems, and for them Wikipedia is working quite nicely. It is just when someone has perhaps a different point of view then Jimbo Wales on Ayn Rand, or on JayJG on the Middle East, and so on down the line for the rest of his lieutenants that this becomes obvious. But if one is interested, look into the JayJG Arbcom appointment, look into the blocks from mention of Wikipedia Review on the Criticism of Wikipedia page etc. As I said, there is a cultish quality to Wikipedia, I posted about this on Slashdot before and you get replies from some admins, like "You are one of THOSE PEOPLE! An ENEMY of WIKIPEDIA! A VANDAL/SOCKPUPPET/WHATEVER!" It is the same cultish thing as banning mention of Wikipedia Review that existed before - if Wikipedia is open, why are people critical of Wikipedia on Wikipedia Review considered "enemies"? I should mention I was once blocked for some hours - for criticizing Essjay, who was an administrator who lied about his credentials, and used to refer to his non-existent credentials when edit warring over different articles. This was reported in the mainstream press (about Essjay, not me). I posted to his page that he should be ashamed of himself and I was blocked by an administrator for that for 24 or 48 hours, I forget. So yes, I am one of those "vandals" who was blocked from Wikipedia.
Of course we should mention that Hamas was funded by the Mossad originally as a bulwark against the PLO, something that mainstream sources in Israel and the US acknowledge. Israel (with help from the US) knocked out the secular, left-wing Palestinians like the PFLP, DFLP and company as that is who they have always been afraid of. So what is left but the religious nationalists? Israel prefers them in charge, as does the US. They make an easier target.
The US overthrew the secular Iranian government in the 1950s and installed a dictatorship...now the only complaint is the pro-US dictator, the Shah, who wiped out the secular left during his decades in power, is not in charge any more. Iraq had one of the few secular governments in the Middle East, and was a target of two US wars. With US troops now there, Iraq has declared itself an Islamic republic (read the constitution), something never said in Hussein's day (although he was forced to concede some of this after the First Gulf War). So the result of the invasion has been this. Also, of course, the US armed Osama bin Laden so as to overthrow the secular, communist Afghani government.
I don't see what has come out that surpasses Limewire. Bittorrent is dependent on a web page for searching for files and for finding peers. DHT and Peer Exchange help in this somewhat. Bittorrent is also dependent on web pages in searching for files. Tribler, Cubit and Torrent Exchange are attempts to solve this, but nothing has come out that deals with this, while it has been OK from day one with Gnutella. Gnutella is fundamentally peer-to-peer and extensible. If something better has replaced Limewire I haven't heard of it.
There have been a number of discussions of how to bootstrap. One clever program, I forget which one (Shareaza?) joined an IRC channel and servents would connect to each other. There was a webcaching scheme around for a while - some of them are still active, although it didn't really work out as they wanted.
It also says "court was prosecuting one of the two men for involvement in the death of Mohammadi Ashtiani's husband". Yes "involved in the death", another way of saying murder.
The slanting of this article is incredible. If a woman in Texas had an affair with a man, a man who then murdered her husband, and months later she had been convicted under a death sentence for conspiring to murder her husband with her lover, do you think there would be anything like this in the article? Do you think maybe you wouldn't have to piece together that she was thought to be a co-conspirator in those who murdered, I mean were "involved in the death", of her husband? A cursory read of this would make one thing this woman was getting the death penalty for having an affair.
Then there's the canard - "Well, just edit it". Well, look through the history and discussion pages - people have, but their edits are reverted by the usual Wikipedia cabal. Their control of articles like this are backed up by the Arbitration Committee, and ultimately Jimbo Wales himself, whose devotion to Ayn Rand and the like are well known. Anyone with little involvement with Wikipedia might easily believe it is free and open. Even those heavily involved in uncontroversial editing of articles on science, math and the like might not see it. But a long-time observance of things is obvious. Just look at the enormously controversial and biased JayJG failing in the 2006 vote to make the Arbitration Committee - but Jimbo Wales appointing him to it anyhow. I pick that as JayJG is heavily biased against Iran. I am not Iranian, but I do find it laughable how the Americans who overthrew Mossadegh and the democratic government of Iran in the 1950s and installed a brutal dictator now whine about the Iranian government, and turn their eyes from their bloody Texan death rows to some far-off village in Iran and make some woman who conspired with her lover to murder her husband into some cause celebre.
Yes, universities want to get rid of tenure due to their desire to be "intellectually fluid". From every case I know about, universities don't want to replace long-time professors with teaching assistants (called "teaching fellows" at some places) due to desire toward being "intellectually fluid" but due to the fact that it costs a lot less for them. It is almost always about short-term budget concerns, not some goal of greater intellectual achievement
At my college, there are a few core courses which every CS student must take, and they are all taught by long-time, tenured professors. These professors have published papers, really know their stuff, and have excellent ways of teaching about backtracking algorithms, linked lists, stacks, queues and the like. In other classes we get these teaching assistants who are often going for their Masters, don't have a good grasp of the material, don't know how to teach it, and usually seem harried between their teaching and their studies. The only positive for me from my non-CS classes is some of the young, female TAs are attractive and pleasant, although often also incompetent as teachers.
Another thing that professors often mention - professors are usually not judged by how highly they are rated in teaching undergraduate classes, but by how many grants they bring in, what journals their articles get published in, and what they are doing in research with their graduate students. So if universities wanted professors to be better teachers, simply giving their teaching ability some more measure in how they stood could improve undergraduate teaching. If you're paid by publish-or-perish and your undergraduate classes count for little, who is surprised if teaching suffers? It's amazing how many professors put effort into their classes even though it does nothing for them financially.
Also, tenure has already had many nails pounded into its coffin. How many tenure-track positions are there nowadays in a department of a college? And how many classes are being taught by people not in a tenure-track position? It's cheaper for colleges to eliminate those positions, and then tell graduate students they don't have to pay tuition and will get some negligible pay to teach classes.
Despite the idea that universities are outposts of Bolshevism, I know of many, many cases of left-wing professors being booted from their colleges, who the administration tries to boot from college, or fight over tenure and so forth. Paul Wellstone, Howard Zinn, David Graeber, Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Ward Churchill, Cornel West, these names spring to mind and there have been many more. One of the ideas of tenure is to allow for a free intellectual culture where one can not be booted out of the university for their opinions. I should note that this idea arose a little over a century ago, things used to be much worse, where American scholars who said something some college donor disliked would expect to find themselves out of a job.
Secondly, a lot of code in Linux is created to follow POSIX standards. There is code in SCO Unix and Linux which looks very similar, but the source for the material is the IEEE Posix standard, not SCO Unix source code.