Not at all -- you could have a high IQ but be irresponsible or dishonest or difficult to work with.
What's the value of a 4 year degree then?
I took a labor economics class (but was not an econ major, so take with salt), and there were two theories on this: 1) that the more education you had the more productive employee you were since you knew more and 2) that a college degree was simply a flag indicating that you are more likely to be an effective employee the more degrees you have, since getting a PhD is possible but not easy (and therefore not as likely) for a dumb or unfocused or disorganized person but much easier for a smart and/or organized focused person.
I've actually thought a lot about this and have come to the conclusion that #2 is pretty right on.
Even this is far from a perfect indicator as to what sort of employee you'll be -- but not as meaningless as intelligence alone (assuming that an IQ test is a meaninful measure of intelligence).
Hell, even in the case of working in large groups that do fairly geeky technical things being a person with whom people can get along and who is responsible is actually more useful than a smart person with a bad attitude or who is irresponsible.
For a boss in a large company (where politics are, I think, inevitable) being trustworthy or loyal might even be the single most important thing (for the boss that is -- not necessarily the company as a whole).
in all fairness, when you design a nuclear vessel you can more readily design with a safety factor of 40 (and in fact, I do remember a materials professor telling the class that it turns out that some nuclear reactors were, due to stacking up of safety factors by different engineers working on different aspects of the vessel, built with ridiculous safety factors.
When you design an airplane you simply can't take the safe route and design a safety factor of 100 (or whatever) -- you have to walk a much gutsier fine line between weight/fuel efficiency and safety (and hence the "scary" safety factors used in aircraft). Also, this is why the aerospace industry spends so much time and money concerned with the material fatigue (I guess I question the notion that nuclear vessel designers are the ones most interested in crack growth/propagation, especially when huge, comfortable, safety factors are acceptable design criteria).
So I did want to add that crack propagation is of great interest to just about any engineering discipline -- and a lot of research and study is carried out by the automobile industry, the aerospace industry, etc. This concerns many many more people than just the folks who design pressure vessels (icluding electronic hardware -- I knew someone involved in the study of fatigue failure in solder bonds in electronics due to cooling and heating of the appliance).
This question of whether AI is possible in any real sense is pretty subtle IMHO. I think we as technologists do tend to look at the human mind as a computer or as a machine, which then implies that all we need is a fast enough processor in our PC and the correct software and we'd have human sentience.
The problem is that much of what we take for granted as intelligence, and all of what we perceive aesthetically, emotionally (colors, feelings, etc.) appear to be 100% biological. In other words, fear, love, etc. (as we experience them) are meaningless outside of our biological setting.
So we might be able to build a machine that mimics all of these human characteristics, but it still wouldn't actually understand fear or love as we do. Same for these robotic dogs.
However, the question here isn't whether the dogs are really glad to see you like a flesh and blood dog would -- I think the question is how well they can mimic and ape these behaviors and how well they can fool us when we interact with them. Sort of like a turing test for dogs I suppose, and it really doesn't seem so far fetched to me.
I did want to say that to me, at any rate, the human mind is more complicated than a PC with the correct software -- it's hard to separate the biological part of our conscious mind. We might not achieve AI (in the pure sense of the phrase, not in the "your car has AI in the breaks" abusive sense of the phrase) until we can predict human behaviour by modeling the physics of the chemical interactions in our brains (that is, not for a long time -- maybe even never since we may never fully understand our own minds).
to back you up, I'm in the exact same boat -- and of course I checked the "sent to" address carefully.
I have user.name@gmail, and receive e-mails sent to some other guy with the username@gmail account. It's not a typo, right there in the "to" field is the other e-mail address (without the period) and yet I'm receiving it.
The really weird thing is that it certainly appears that I'm not receiving all of his e-mail, just on occassion and sporadically.
No, they are definitely two separate accounts. I have a user.name@gmail account, and receive e-mail meant for the username@gmail account that someone else is using and sending e-mail from.
In fact, I originally wanted username@gmail, but that was taken so gmail suggested user.name which I took.
The weird thing is that I'm pretty sure I'm not receiving all of this guy's e-mail, since he runs a business and keeps an apparently loooong contact list of people he e-mails, and yet I receive e-mails obviously addressed to him 2 or 3 times a week only. I expect he actually receives many times this number of business-related e-mail.
I wonder how many of my e-mails he's received and read? hmmm this is scary, as I do receive bank statements, password change notifications to my bank, etc.
This is actually a pretty big deal, in fact! I wish it was as you describe (not separate accounts) since then it wouldn't matter much -- but I'm afraid this is sort of a big screwup on Google's part (and I just finished getting all inspired by that BBC clip on Google!)
Well, I can see how that may be the case in the future, but the parent is correct: the current challenge seems to be that computers are no where near as capable as humans in interpreting the visual data. Is that a small bush I can trample over or a mossy rock that I should drive around?
From the article, early entries got spooked by their own shadows (a moving boulder!).
It does also seem clear that this was an "easy" first challenge to make it possible for these early driving brains to navigate (not to knock them, you've got to crawl before you run hurdles). The more varied the conditions are, the more challenging it is for these primitive driving brains.
Our advantage isn't our eyes (we've been able to build much better cameras than our eyes for a long time now, and you're right in that we could outfit machines with sensors that put our meager eyesight to shame) -- our advantage is our brain, our interpretive power on incoming data, and our understanding of our enviroment ("a boulder of that size wouldn't tumble along on this slight breeze, so it isn't a boulder but a tumbleweed")
I'd guess they probably both read Cosmos in the 80s:)
Sagan mentions that the salinity of our innards is similar to the ocean (our internal ocean), we are literally made out of dead star stuff, and that cosmic radiation is the fuel that powers the random mutations that drive evolution.
He points out that we are, in a very literal sense, children of the stars.
Good stuff.
(I think most of this wasn't new to me even when I was reading Cosmos, but I certainly hadn't put it all together like that -- I always did think it was a nice thought).
I'm fluent in Spanish (my native tongue, actually) and have taken only a few courses in French (so I'm far from an expert). They're remarkably similar in grammar (along with Italian and Portugese-- I can actually understand quite a bit of spoken Italian and Portugese, they're that similar). I can understand some written French, though when it's spoken it sounds too different for me to understand much (in fact, I was able to diagnose/fix a problem I was having with a Linux install many years ago by following a French website).
I'd personally wager that all the romance languages would be exactly as easy/hard to learn for a non-romance language speaker: they're remarkably similar.
Personally, I found pronunciation in French more difficult than learning to pronounce English words -- but I'd wager that's more to do with the fact that I was 9 when learning English and much older when I took French than with anything innate to either language.
(thinking about this now, as I write this, I do have to concede that French has more accents to keep track of. On the other hand, I imagine it's the same as Spanish -- once you know the rules of what they mean, they're actually an asset in figuring out how to pronounce the word. The reverse is also true, once you know what the word sounds like, you know how/where to put the accents, so I'm not sure if extra accents overall add or remove difficulty. There's more to learn for a newbie, but then there's much less ambiguity in spelling/pronunciation than with accentless English).
I think the quote you provided actually proves my point, as the guy specifically states that being a pacifist nation and participating in this venture are not contradictions. He's not alarmed.
The only one alarmed by the fact that the US DOD is participating (and I'm just going by the provided link) is that congresswoman. Mexican university leaders, and the president of the country itself obviously aren't concerned.
My own guess is that it's a politician being a politician, and trying to ride the new-found suspicion of the US abroad (whether this is currently the case in Mexico, I do not know. I do know that generally speaking Mexicans have had a mostly benevolent view of their "blonde cousins to the north". How much this changed after the invasion of Iraq -- which Mexicans generally did not support -- I don't know).
Not an important point, but I do think that we're sitting here discussing the "evil links to the DOD" because of one congresswoman in Mexico.
"The Mexicans" are not concerned, a Mexican congresswoman is concerned. Since Mexico is funding the majority of the project (60% so far, according to the article), I'd say that most Mexican politicians (including the president, Vicente Fox, as quoted in the article) are in favor of the project.
Not only that, while I do think that the US government works secretly on nasty projects to do weapons research -- I don't think this is how they do it: with construction mostly financed by and carried out in another country, with (I'm guessing here) management by Mexican univerities (the UNAM?).
Not the plan used for the Manhattan project, right?
I think this is congresswoman in Mexico, who honestly or for the sake of publicity, is making a big deal about protecting the electorate or taking a "high moral ground" and getting picked up by Slashdot.
I'm sure the telescope has military uses - just about anything does. I honestly have a hard time believing that this will be its main use (what a stupid way of going about a military secret, no?)
In addition to agreeing with you: real's player on Linux is actually rather nice (one of the nicest, IMHO -- they've come a long way), AFAIK it's the only *legal* way to listen to MP3s in the US under Linux (I am wrong about this?).
Besides, it needs to be said that it's all a matter of opinion: I personally find the default Ubuntu theme to be *the* nicest default theme of any distro I've used -- to the point where I've tried to make my RedHat at work look as much as my Ubuntu at home!
In other words, the Ubuntu brown theme is nice, it's the parent's taste in themes that's suspect!;)
You may actually have a use for your super-sized SUV, so don't get offended as this doesn't apply to you. But, I have to say, that I agree that of all the peple I know with an SUV don't actually need it. They don't off-road, they don't need to haul hay or even own a boat.
The fact is that most (not all,but an overwhelming majority) of people who buy SUVs buy them for other reasons: vanity, image, or whatever. This silliness is where this criticism (I think rightly) comes from.
I actually heard numbers from Jeep, where they were touting that buyers of Jeeps are much more likely to actually go off-road than any other SUV owner -- implying that it was the other guys who were fake poseurs. Of course, the numbers for Jeep owners was pathetic, just not as pathetic (like 7% of Jeep owners off-road, compared to 5% of other SUVs -- or something in that range).
I don't think that this criticism is completely ungrounded -- fact is most people simply don't *need* an SUV, they rationalize it. They are bought more for vanity than utility.
Besides, if you actually need cargo room and off-road capability, you'd be better served by a Subaru than just about any SUV -- they're horribly inneficient use of space (big outside, little inside). Car and driver some time ago actually tested several models of cars -- they ended up using the Subaru to pull an SUV that got stuck in snow, and the Subaru had more useful cargo room than all but one or two monster SUVs.
I actually did see a study done in Germany regarding allergies -- they were asking why it's primarily a disease of the first world.
They followed kids from German farms (where allergies* are less common) and kids from cities (where allergies are more common). One difference was the kids from the country side were exposed more to fecal matter and other "dirty substances" from farm animals, whereas city kids had a tendency to live in much more antiseptic enviroments.
The conclusion was that the human immune system, much like everything else about us, needs to be exercised to properly develop. This seems to be critical at a young age.
So, I think there is something to what you say -- we're actually hurting ourselves (in more ways than just creating resistant bacteria) by obsessing with living in a totally antiseptic enviroment.
*allergies, of course, are nothing more than a malfunctioning immune system, which is over reacting to pollen, etc.
It's not as arbitrary as you claim. I think IBM and Google have done technically interesting things whereas Microsoft, on the other hand, is actually renowned for it's *inability* to innovate.
I think if Microsoft had gotten where it is by invention and doing technically cool things, its image in this geek community would be different.
It's not MS's success that makes it unpopular, and I think it's much more than IBM's support for linux that makes that company popular.
For those reasons I don't think that Google nor IBM -- even if they turned "evil" would be as disliked as Microsoft, since both have "geek cred". At least there's a sense that they've earned their money by doing technically important things.
Microsoft have never contributed technically in any substantial way (in any way? is there an example of a non-trivial technology to come out of that company ever?), and are evil (shady, illegal business tactics) on top of that, hence disliked.
Just the opposite for me, actually. I work for a large and mostly stodgy international technology corporation that is actually trying to get people to use the corporate chat client for "better productivity".
There's a Gaim plugin -- so that's what I use in lieu of the official chat client (Gaim is nicer).
Around here the population is broken down into two demographics: 30ish (and younger) and "about to retire". The "fogies" for the most part seem convinced that this IM thing is another cheesy push by the company that they're pretty sure they won't find useful. In my particular group, I fall in the younger group of people (along with 3 other co-workers in a team of about 20). All three of us "young whipper snappers" are always on the chat client -- none of the rest of my team ever is.
Ironically enough, around here the official stance is "please try out this IM with your coworkers!" and people for the most part aren't interested.
But, IM is actually officially encouraged around here. The only thing that sort of amazes me is that the corporate client won't allow sharing of files -- which would often come in handy.
I think it can be argued that, for wide-scale adoption of Linux, the first step will be the wide-scale adoption of OpenOffice over the MS office suite.
After that, switching out the underlying OS becomes transparent (Ok, more transparent for more people).
I guess I subscribe to the idea that a key foothold MS has (at least in the corporate world) is that all of our data is stored in their propietary file formats. Or, in other words, the problem in switching people over isn't that they have to run a MS os, they have to run the MS apps, in particular their office suite. Excel and Word are defacto standards to run a business -- and by extension the MS OS.
It's in that sense that I do think OpenOffice is incredibly important to the OSS world at large. The threat of being a credible (or higher quality, more useful) replacement is higher than with what's happened (and happening) with Firefox vs IE, since IE is also free. MS Office is far from free -- and I think it'll be easier to justify abandoning it because of the cash saved.
If I were MS, I do think OpenOffice is the one OSS project I'd be most nervous about, as it's one of the major threats to the monopoly, and an attack on one of the biggest reasons companies are forced to pay for the MS OS.
BTW, the web browser is probably the other "very important app" for the same reasons, and it's cool that Mozilla Firefox has grown so much. At work it doesn't matter that I choose to run Linux, since I'm running the same web browser as many people who are running Windows (my company is already formally supporting, and recommending, Firefox for internal use). Again though, imagine that IE was an extra app that companies had to pay money for -- I wonder what the Firefox adoption rate would be.
One last thing, it's no surprise that MS has from the beginning to "subvert" the web and web standards. It's all about the formats. I guess they simply arrived way too late to the Web to completely take it over. But I'm sure they know that if they had managed to switch everyone over to ms-propietary-html to surf the web, we'd be paying through the nose for IE and their OS and Office monopoly would be further protected.
I think it's backwards. Given the GNU movement (the movement, the license, the goal of an OS) Linux was inevitable. It was a simple matter of (most likely, a very short) time.
Without the GNU movement, nothing would have happened. Linux (the kernel) was an inevitable an obvious goal after that. Stallman simply does not get the credit he deserves, and Linus is given credit for a movement, license, ideology and an OS where credit for a kernel is due.
You know, this argument always comes up, and I've just realized I don't buy it.
Look at the relative size of the two countries, and then look at the relative highway infrastructures.
Size is not an excuse, it's a matter of will (or lack thereof) on the part of the US, end of story. Either we want to invest in infrastructure or we sit around with thumbs up our butts making excuses "but we're just too big and rich!"
I suspect the real reason is what the summary hints at -- progress threatens profits for companies making money from the status quo, investment in the country be dammned! (I've become pretty cynical regarding the US government and who it really serves).
I think that maybe you disagree with the bazaar model, but it certainly doesn't fail to adress your concerns:
Here's a quote:
"The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we're learning from Linux (and what I've verified experimentally on a smaller scale by deliberately copying Linus's methods [EGCS]). That is, while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which feedback exploring the design space, code contributions, bug-spotting, and other improvements come from from hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people."
At some critical level of users Raymond compares Linux (the kernel) to an atomic explosion in terms of critical mass, basically stating that the single most important thing is a thundering herd of users and developers. Individual talent of a single person be damned! (or, at least, it's not as important as one would naturally assume).
So, individual talent is definitely taken into account. It's just deemed surprisingly unimportant: what you really need is the largest group possible.
Actually, just the opposite. A company that hinders free-market forces *hurts* the economy.
Think of the drain MS, through monopolistically-inflated prices, has on the rest of the world through the fees associated with running a computer, and being forced to buy the OS at high cost from a single vendor. And then, because of the nature of the monopoly, being forced to re-purchase the same functionality over and over again.
I happen to think that the service MS provides as its bread and butter is of very little real value, so I have to say that I have just the opposite viewpoint: the economy as a whole would benefit tremendously from a bankrupt and non-existent MS.
All those amazing revenues that MS sees every quarter is money unnecessarily spent by companies that, on the whole, actually do produce value for a living. There is a reason, after all, why in this very capitalist of countries, MS-like behavior is *illegal*.
Wow, I disagree -- in fact I'd argue that it's actually a minority of people whose only motivation in life is money. What's more, it's a learned social sickness most prevalent in capitalist countries (the marketers have done wonders in brain washing you, son. They tell you that your self-worth is based on the pile of money you have how expensive your jeans are. Most Americans believe them). What you're describing is a capitalist-consumer state of mind, not a universal truth about the human condition.
Without calling each other names -- let's just say that you and I have pretty divergent opinions of humanity.
* An aside: I think there should be an addendum to the "Hitler in an argument" clause, where if anyone points to the downfall of the USSR as proof of the basic merits of a political system they automatically lose the argument. If you think communism is a bad idea (and I'm not saying that it is or isn't), how about a *real* reason, not historical happenstance.
Yeah, but in all fairness it's the same CSM that discovered themselves that the documents were forged, and printed a correction. It was the rest of the right-wing media that didn't catch the "correction" because it didn't help Tom Delay, but CSM did report it.
I have to admit that I was leery of a "Christian Science" Monitor, but over time I've actually come to respect the publication. It's certainly a far cry from the blatant propaganda one can expect from Fox, and in fact (IMHO) seems actually a pretty solid source of news.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all -- you could have a high IQ but be irresponsible or dishonest or difficult to work with.
What's the value of a 4 year degree then?
I took a labor economics class (but was not an econ major, so take with salt), and there were two theories on this: 1) that the more education you had the more productive employee you were since you knew more and 2) that a college degree was simply a flag indicating that you are more likely to be an effective employee the more degrees you have, since getting a PhD is possible but not easy (and therefore not as likely) for a dumb or unfocused or disorganized person but much easier for a smart and/or organized focused person.
I've actually thought a lot about this and have come to the conclusion that #2 is pretty right on.
Even this is far from a perfect indicator as to what sort of employee you'll be -- but not as meaningless as intelligence alone (assuming that an IQ test is a meaninful measure of intelligence).
Hell, even in the case of working in large groups that do fairly geeky technical things being a person with whom people can get along and who is responsible is actually more useful than a smart person with a bad attitude or who is irresponsible.
For a boss in a large company (where politics are, I think, inevitable) being trustworthy or loyal might even be the single most important thing (for the boss that is -- not necessarily the company as a whole).
in all fairness, when you design a nuclear vessel you can more readily design with a safety factor of 40 (and in fact, I do remember a materials professor telling the class that it turns out that some nuclear reactors were, due to stacking up of safety factors by different engineers working on different aspects of the vessel, built with ridiculous safety factors.
When you design an airplane you simply can't take the safe route and design a safety factor of 100 (or whatever) -- you have to walk a much gutsier fine line between weight/fuel efficiency and safety (and hence the "scary" safety factors used in aircraft). Also, this is why the aerospace industry spends so much time and money concerned with the material fatigue (I guess I question the notion that nuclear vessel designers are the ones most interested in crack growth/propagation, especially when huge, comfortable, safety factors are acceptable design criteria).
So I did want to add that crack propagation is of great interest to just about any engineering discipline -- and a lot of research and study is carried out by the automobile industry, the aerospace industry, etc. This concerns many many more people than just the folks who design pressure vessels (icluding electronic hardware -- I knew someone involved in the study of fatigue failure in solder bonds in electronics due to cooling and heating of the appliance).
This question of whether AI is possible in any real sense is pretty subtle IMHO. I think we as technologists do tend to look at the human mind as a computer or as a machine, which then implies that all we need is a fast enough processor in our PC and the correct software and we'd have human sentience.
The problem is that much of what we take for granted as intelligence, and all of what we perceive aesthetically, emotionally (colors, feelings, etc.) appear to be 100% biological. In other words, fear, love, etc. (as we experience them) are meaningless outside of our biological setting.
So we might be able to build a machine that mimics all of these human characteristics, but it still wouldn't actually understand fear or love as we do. Same for these robotic dogs.
However, the question here isn't whether the dogs are really glad to see you like a flesh and blood dog would -- I think the question is how well they can mimic and ape these behaviors and how well they can fool us when we interact with them. Sort of like a turing test for dogs I suppose, and it really doesn't seem so far fetched to me.
I did want to say that to me, at any rate, the human mind is more complicated than a PC with the correct software -- it's hard to separate the biological part of our conscious mind. We might not achieve AI (in the pure sense of the phrase, not in the "your car has AI in the breaks" abusive sense of the phrase) until we can predict human behaviour by modeling the physics of the chemical interactions in our brains (that is, not for a long time -- maybe even never since we may never fully understand our own minds).
to back you up, I'm in the exact same boat -- and of course I checked the "sent to" address carefully.
I have user.name@gmail, and receive e-mails sent to some other guy with the username@gmail account. It's not a typo, right there in the "to" field is the other e-mail address (without the period) and yet I'm receiving it.
The really weird thing is that it certainly appears that I'm not receiving all of his e-mail, just on occassion and sporadically.
No, they are definitely two separate accounts. I have a user.name@gmail account, and receive e-mail meant for the username@gmail account that someone else is using and sending e-mail from.
In fact, I originally wanted username@gmail, but that was taken so gmail suggested user.name which I took.
The weird thing is that I'm pretty sure I'm not receiving all of this guy's e-mail, since he runs a business and keeps an apparently loooong contact list of people he e-mails, and yet I receive e-mails obviously addressed to him 2 or 3 times a week only. I expect he actually receives many times this number of business-related e-mail.
I wonder how many of my e-mails he's received and read? hmmm this is scary, as I do receive bank statements, password change notifications to my bank, etc.
This is actually a pretty big deal, in fact! I wish it was as you describe (not separate accounts) since then it wouldn't matter much -- but I'm afraid this is sort of a big screwup on Google's part (and I just finished getting all inspired by that BBC clip on Google!)
Well, I can see how that may be the case in the future, but the parent is correct: the current challenge seems to be that computers are no where near as capable as humans in interpreting the visual data. Is that a small bush I can trample over or a mossy rock that I should drive around?
From the article, early entries got spooked by their own shadows (a moving boulder!).
It does also seem clear that this was an "easy" first challenge to make it possible for these early driving brains to navigate (not to knock them, you've got to crawl before you run hurdles). The more varied the conditions are, the more challenging it is for these primitive driving brains.
Our advantage isn't our eyes (we've been able to build much better cameras than our eyes for a long time now, and you're right in that we could outfit machines with sensors that put our meager eyesight to shame) -- our advantage is our brain, our interpretive power on incoming data, and our understanding of our enviroment ("a boulder of that size wouldn't tumble along on this slight breeze, so it isn't a boulder but a tumbleweed")
I'd guess they probably both read Cosmos in the 80s :)
Sagan mentions that the salinity of our innards is similar to the ocean (our internal ocean), we are literally made out of dead star stuff, and that cosmic radiation is the fuel that powers the random mutations that drive evolution.
He points out that we are, in a very literal sense, children of the stars.
Good stuff.
(I think most of this wasn't new to me even when I was reading Cosmos, but I certainly hadn't put it all together like that -- I always did think it was a nice thought).
I'm fluent in Spanish (my native tongue, actually) and have taken only a few courses in French (so I'm far from an expert). They're remarkably similar in grammar (along with Italian and Portugese-- I can actually understand quite a bit of spoken Italian and Portugese, they're that similar). I can understand some written French, though when it's spoken it sounds too different for me to understand much (in fact, I was able to diagnose/fix a problem I was having with a Linux install many years ago by following a French website).
I'd personally wager that all the romance languages would be exactly as easy/hard to learn for a non-romance language speaker: they're remarkably similar.
Personally, I found pronunciation in French more difficult than learning to pronounce English words -- but I'd wager that's more to do with the fact that I was 9 when learning English and much older when I took French than with anything innate to either language.
(thinking about this now, as I write this, I do have to concede that French has more accents to keep track of. On the other hand, I imagine it's the same as Spanish -- once you know the rules of what they mean, they're actually an asset in figuring out how to pronounce the word. The reverse is also true, once you know what the word sounds like, you know how/where to put the accents, so I'm not sure if extra accents overall add or remove difficulty. There's more to learn for a newbie, but then there's much less ambiguity in spelling/pronunciation than with accentless English).
I think the quote you provided actually proves my point, as the guy specifically states that being a pacifist nation and participating in this venture are not contradictions. He's not alarmed.
The only one alarmed by the fact that the US DOD is participating (and I'm just going by the provided link) is that congresswoman. Mexican university leaders, and the president of the country itself obviously aren't concerned.
My own guess is that it's a politician being a politician, and trying to ride the new-found suspicion of the US abroad (whether this is currently the case in Mexico, I do not know. I do know that generally speaking Mexicans have had a mostly benevolent view of their "blonde cousins to the north". How much this changed after the invasion of Iraq -- which Mexicans generally did not support -- I don't know).
Not an important point, but I do think that we're sitting here discussing the "evil links to the DOD" because of one congresswoman in Mexico.
"The Mexicans" are not concerned, a Mexican congresswoman is concerned. Since Mexico is funding the majority of the project (60% so far, according to the article), I'd say that most Mexican politicians (including the president, Vicente Fox, as quoted in the article) are in favor of the project.
Not only that, while I do think that the US government works secretly on nasty projects to do weapons research -- I don't think this is how they do it: with construction mostly financed by and carried out in another country, with (I'm guessing here) management by Mexican univerities (the UNAM?).
Not the plan used for the Manhattan project, right?
I think this is congresswoman in Mexico, who honestly or for the sake of publicity, is making a big deal about protecting the electorate or taking a "high moral ground" and getting picked up by Slashdot.
I'm sure the telescope has military uses - just about anything does. I honestly have a hard time believing that this will be its main use (what a stupid way of going about a military secret, no?)
In addition to agreeing with you: real's player on Linux is actually rather nice (one of the nicest, IMHO -- they've come a long way), AFAIK it's the only *legal* way to listen to MP3s in the US under Linux (I am wrong about this?).
Besides, it needs to be said that it's all a matter of opinion: I personally find the default Ubuntu theme to be *the* nicest default theme of any distro I've used -- to the point where I've tried to make my RedHat at work look as much as my Ubuntu at home!
;)
In other words, the Ubuntu brown theme is nice, it's the parent's taste in themes that's suspect!
as long as you stand on their shoulders and not their heads they should be OK.
You may actually have a use for your super-sized SUV, so don't get offended as this doesn't apply to you. But, I have to say, that I agree that of all the peple I know with an SUV don't actually need it. They don't off-road, they don't need to haul hay or even own a boat.
The fact is that most (not all,but an overwhelming majority) of people who buy SUVs buy them for other reasons: vanity, image, or whatever. This silliness is where this criticism (I think rightly) comes from.
I actually heard numbers from Jeep, where they were touting that buyers of Jeeps are much more likely to actually go off-road than any other SUV owner -- implying that it was the other guys who were fake poseurs. Of course, the numbers for Jeep owners was pathetic, just not as pathetic (like 7% of Jeep owners off-road, compared to 5% of other SUVs -- or something in that range).
I don't think that this criticism is completely ungrounded -- fact is most people simply don't *need* an SUV, they rationalize it. They are bought more for vanity than utility.
Besides, if you actually need cargo room and off-road capability, you'd be better served by a Subaru than just about any SUV -- they're horribly inneficient use of space (big outside, little inside). Car and driver some time ago actually tested several models of cars -- they ended up using the Subaru to pull an SUV that got stuck in snow, and the Subaru had more useful cargo room than all but one or two monster SUVs.
I actually did see a study done in Germany regarding allergies -- they were asking why it's primarily a disease of the first world.
They followed kids from German farms (where allergies* are less common) and kids from cities (where allergies are more common). One difference was the kids from the country side were exposed more to fecal matter and other "dirty substances" from farm animals, whereas city kids had a tendency to live in much more antiseptic enviroments.
The conclusion was that the human immune system, much like everything else about us, needs to be exercised to properly develop. This seems to be critical at a young age.
So, I think there is something to what you say -- we're actually hurting ourselves (in more ways than just creating resistant bacteria) by obsessing with living in a totally antiseptic enviroment.
*allergies, of course, are nothing more than a malfunctioning immune system, which is over reacting to pollen, etc.
I have to say I disagree somewhat.
It's not as arbitrary as you claim. I think IBM and Google have done technically interesting things whereas Microsoft, on the other hand, is actually renowned for it's *inability* to innovate.
I think if Microsoft had gotten where it is by invention and doing technically cool things, its image in this geek community would be different.
It's not MS's success that makes it unpopular, and I think it's much more than IBM's support for linux that makes that company popular.
For those reasons I don't think that Google nor IBM -- even if they turned "evil" would be as disliked as Microsoft, since both have "geek cred". At least there's a sense that they've earned their money by doing technically important things.
Microsoft have never contributed technically in any substantial way (in any way? is there an example of a non-trivial technology to come out of that company ever?), and are evil (shady, illegal business tactics) on top of that, hence disliked.
Just the opposite for me, actually. I work for a large and mostly stodgy international technology corporation that is actually trying to get people to use the corporate chat client for "better productivity".
There's a Gaim plugin -- so that's what I use in lieu of the official chat client (Gaim is nicer).
Around here the population is broken down into two demographics: 30ish (and younger) and "about to retire". The "fogies" for the most part seem convinced that this IM thing is another cheesy push by the company that they're pretty sure they won't find useful. In my particular group, I fall in the younger group of people (along with 3 other co-workers in a team of about 20). All three of us "young whipper snappers" are always on the chat client -- none of the rest of my team ever is.
Ironically enough, around here the official stance is "please try out this IM with your coworkers!" and people for the most part aren't interested.
But, IM is actually officially encouraged around here. The only thing that sort of amazes me is that the corporate client won't allow sharing of files -- which would often come in handy.
I think it can be argued that, for wide-scale adoption of Linux, the first step will be the wide-scale adoption of OpenOffice over the MS office suite.
After that, switching out the underlying OS becomes transparent (Ok, more transparent for more people).
I guess I subscribe to the idea that a key foothold MS has (at least in the corporate world) is that all of our data is stored in their propietary file formats. Or, in other words, the problem in switching people over isn't that they have to run a MS os, they have to run the MS apps, in particular their office suite. Excel and Word are defacto standards to run a business -- and by extension the MS OS.
It's in that sense that I do think OpenOffice is incredibly important to the OSS world at large. The threat of being a credible (or higher quality, more useful) replacement is higher than with what's happened (and happening) with Firefox vs IE, since IE is also free. MS Office is far from free -- and I think it'll be easier to justify abandoning it because of the cash saved.
If I were MS, I do think OpenOffice is the one OSS project I'd be most nervous about, as it's one of the major threats to the monopoly, and an attack on one of the biggest reasons companies are forced to pay for the MS OS.
BTW, the web browser is probably the other "very important app" for the same reasons, and it's cool that Mozilla Firefox has grown so much. At work it doesn't matter that I choose to run Linux, since I'm running the same web browser as many people who are running Windows (my company is already formally supporting, and recommending, Firefox for internal use). Again though, imagine that IE was an extra app that companies had to pay money for -- I wonder what the Firefox adoption rate would be.
One last thing, it's no surprise that MS has from the beginning to "subvert" the web and web standards. It's all about the formats. I guess they simply arrived way too late to the Web to completely take it over. But I'm sure they know that if they had managed to switch everyone over to ms-propietary-html to surf the web, we'd be paying through the nose for IE and their OS and Office monopoly would be further protected.
I think it's backwards. Given the GNU movement (the movement, the license, the goal of an OS) Linux was inevitable. It was a simple matter of (most likely, a very short) time.
Without the GNU movement, nothing would have happened. Linux (the kernel) was an inevitable an obvious goal after that. Stallman simply does not get the credit he deserves, and Linus is given credit for a movement, license, ideology and an OS where credit for a kernel is due.
I wanted to add that both IBM and Google have done technically interesting things, earning "nerd cred".
Microsoft is conspicously absent in having done much (anything at all?) that's technically interesting. They just seem to make money.
I think it's easier to like IBM and Google, and have disdain for Microsoft, if you're a nerd who appreciates technology.
You know, this argument always comes up, and I've just realized I don't buy it.
Look at the relative size of the two countries, and then look at the relative highway infrastructures.
Size is not an excuse, it's a matter of will (or lack thereof) on the part of the US, end of story. Either we want to invest in infrastructure or we sit around with thumbs up our butts making excuses "but we're just too big and rich!"
I suspect the real reason is what the summary hints at -- progress threatens profits for companies making money from the status quo, investment in the country be dammned! (I've become pretty cynical regarding the US government and who it really serves).
I think that maybe you disagree with the bazaar model, but it certainly doesn't fail to adress your concerns:
b azaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html
Here's a quote:
"The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we're learning from Linux (and what I've verified experimentally on a smaller scale by deliberately copying Linus's methods [EGCS]). That is, while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which feedback exploring the design space, code contributions, bug-spotting, and other improvements come from from hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people."
taken from:http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-
At some critical level of users Raymond compares Linux (the kernel) to an atomic explosion in terms of critical mass, basically stating that the single most important thing is a thundering herd of users and developers. Individual talent of a single person be damned! (or, at least, it's not as important as one would naturally assume).
So, individual talent is definitely taken into account. It's just deemed surprisingly unimportant: what you really need is the largest group possible.
Actually, just the opposite. A company that hinders free-market forces *hurts* the economy.
Think of the drain MS, through monopolistically-inflated prices, has on the rest of the world through the fees associated with running a computer, and being forced to buy the OS at high cost from a single vendor. And then, because of the nature of the monopoly, being forced to re-purchase the same functionality over and over again.
I happen to think that the service MS provides as its bread and butter is of very little real value, so I have to say that I have just the opposite viewpoint: the economy as a whole would benefit tremendously from a bankrupt and non-existent MS.
All those amazing revenues that MS sees every quarter is money unnecessarily spent by companies that, on the whole, actually do produce value for a living. There is a reason, after all, why in this very capitalist of countries, MS-like behavior is *illegal*.
Wow, I disagree -- in fact I'd argue that it's actually a minority of people whose only motivation in life is money. What's more, it's a learned social sickness most prevalent in capitalist countries (the marketers have done wonders in brain washing you, son. They tell you that your self-worth is based on the pile of money you have how expensive your jeans are. Most Americans believe them). What you're describing is a capitalist-consumer state of mind, not a universal truth about the human condition.
Without calling each other names -- let's just say that you and I have pretty divergent opinions of humanity.
* An aside: I think there should be an addendum to the "Hitler in an argument" clause, where if anyone points to the downfall of the USSR as proof of the basic merits of a political system they automatically lose the argument. If you think communism is a bad idea (and I'm not saying that it is or isn't), how about a *real* reason, not historical happenstance.
Yeah, but in all fairness it's the same CSM that discovered themselves that the documents were forged, and printed a correction. It was the rest of the right-wing media that didn't catch the "correction" because it didn't help Tom Delay, but CSM did report it.
I have to admit that I was leery of a "Christian Science" Monitor, but over time I've actually come to respect the publication. It's certainly a far cry from the blatant propaganda one can expect from Fox, and in fact (IMHO) seems actually a pretty solid source of news.