If people keep using computers in the same ways they do now, I agree. How much work will we really have in 10 years replacing hard drives, fixing registries, and un-SNAFUing basic netowrks?
On the other hand, if people continue to find more and more things to do with computers- continue to have more and more data to manage and cross-connect, deploy more capable systems, video motion detection, wearable computers with continuous video recording, phone recording and indexing, or who knows what- this would counteract the trend you describe.
I wonder if we will see a huge increase in automation- automated grocery stores that stock themselves and check out via RFID, automated fast food restaurants that crank out pizzas, burgers (veggie hopefully if you ask me), etc..
There could be a whole new round of techie hiring were this to happen.. I'm not sure society could handle the sudden reduction of legitimate jobs for the uneducated though.
I like how it is now taboo to say anything bad about lower class people, or people of other cultures (not implying these are consistently the same thing), without being branded as a bigot.
The initial idea, from what I can tell, was to say that it is wrong to simplify reality and assume that eveyone in a certain culture or group is the same way. That's clearly wrong and seems to fit better the idea 'bigot'.
However, it is dangerously ignoring reality to try to say that anyone who states that MANY people in a given class or culture do something similar is being bigoted..
The original side note did seem a little off topic though. Just like those I-got-mine conservative people who drive slow in the left lane and refuse to follow slow-traffic-keep-right. They're real asswipes who probably use no-name cabling and buy microsoft products.
I've thought about this too. Here in the US, I teach introduction to computers at the community college level. Textbooks have reached the point that they cost more than the tuition for the class! So, you could more than halve the cost of an introduction to computers class for low income people here, not to memtion the benefits for people in your situation.
Sure, there are many partial haphazard resources out there already, but as far as I've seen, no coherent, organised single source textbook for us to gather around.
If we have maybe 12 people each write a chapter, say one on input devices, one on the various formats and kinds of disk storage, another on basic internet applications, etc, then maybe have one or two people lay out the pages and find photos, maybe other people contributing the 'infographic' illustrations.. it wouldn't be an unreasonable amount of work for each, and given the dubious quality of the commercial equivalent, we could easily outdue the other offerings out there in quality and with-it-ness.
Everyone involved could be well credited on the title page, but it would be very important that everyone undertstood that this would be a permanently and fully non-profit effort.
Additionaly, it would give us a chance to counter the microsoft-toadying theme of many of the commercial texts.
Updates would be important, so we'd have to organise a way to continually maintain the digital textbook, keeping it current, while keeping in mind the teachability of the text..
We could build the textbook in a modular way, so that each instructor could choose the segments that match their student's software, equipment, and skill level. Each segment would be complete with text, links for further reading, and a couple different kinds of assignments. In-class and hands on projects would be a nice addition too.
That's what I've been thinking, but such projects seem to work best with a combination of collective decision making and individual initiative.
Ok, many of us see the need for this, so let's do it! I've set up a yahoo group for us to get together on this. The first order of business will be to decide how we will go about the project (wiki/ not wiki, whose webspace, etc) and then, to work out a general outline of what chapters are essential to such a text (additional subject could always be welcomed), then to divvy up the initial chapters and get at it!
Many of this have seen the need for this for a long time. Let's do something about it together.
My dad was using his 10 watt analog bag phone on Cingular here in Texas up until early this year (when he bought the phone they were still GTE).. The reps offered him nice new free phones to get rid of the old one, but they didn't force him to give it up. So I imagine if you can find someone who refuses to upgrade you could potentially start paying their bill.:)
I'm surprised that no own has discussed the idea sometimes called 'downshifting'. You know, it's not a requirement of life to have a beige condo, a mortgaged car, and dependent wife- although you might get sucked into those things in reverse order if you fall under the wrong person's spell.:)
From my perspective, there is plenty to make life sweet, purposeful, and meaningful without bringing in big money.. things like the public library, a directional wifi antenna;), baking your own bread, and building stuff with dumpster-dived lumber.
Looking at the last 1000 years, someone living in a relatively simply way in the modern west, and working part time still has options for living far beyond what most of humankind felt pretty happy with during most of that time. To put it another way, how would you feel towards the person of the future who essentially asked 'Should I quit my job? I'd be giving up my 5000 square foot home, I'd have to learn to use a kitchen, and start wearing clothes more than once, so I guess that's not really an option. I better have another job lined up first.'?..
I wish I could find the specific show, but this is documented somewhere in the vast vault of kpftarchive.org.
A woman and animal rights activist I know fairly well was stopped in the Houston, Texas airport after returning from overseas with her parents. She was seperated from her parents by armed guards, held for hours, and had to wait for the local FBI / sheriff person to show up. Turns out this person has been attending demonstrations undercover for years.
The key detail is that this woman, and everyone else in the Houston animal rights community, is strictly dedicated to non-violence and legal, peaceful, non-sidewalk blocking demonstrations. She's specifically taken on some powerful scum, such as Charles Hurwitz.
The FBI agent vaguely threatened her, and mentioned details that according to the woman in question could only have been gained by listening to her private telephone calls.
Then, the tactics changed, and the agent began to offer her college tuition or even cash for turning informant (not withstanding the fact that there is actually nothing for her to inform about). She declined. Finally, several hours later she was released. She had committed no crime, was not involved in the investigation of any crime, and was never given good reason as to why she had been held.
It seems that just mere connection with a peaceful, unpopular cause is enough to be threatened.
In fact, an agent (possibly the same one) once told me that 'you'd be surprised what you can do to someone without ever pressing charges' - a clear threat.
She bravely went on the radio the next day to tell everyone what had happened. I imagine most people just keep quiet.
teachers make a small impact. so do small organized non-profit groups. here in houston, texas, at least there is SOMEONE to protest halliburton so the press can carry the story.
I can say from experience that an activist groups with 3-4 committed members, and 20+ occasional supporters can appear to be a larger group, and can make an impact in legislation and public opinion. for example, a handful of activists groups here in Texas got horse slaughter outlawed, among a slew of other laws. And the esperanto society of houston has made many thousands of people aware of esperanto and trained dozens.. talk about a hard sell in texas!
This is the same Rick Perry that was elected as an 'aw shucks' farmer to be agriculture commissioner then turned around and gave Archer Daniel Midland the right to grade all Texas peanuts, including their own, pissing off the otherwise republicna voting farmers aware enough to notice. Of course guess who effectively paid for his campaign?
Corruption goes beyond ideology. It's pretty much always bad. The republican base seems to be mainly people like these farmers and ranchers, who are vulnerable to a flag draped propoganda machine such as the republicans have skillfully builr. They're vulnerable because they're uninformed, and it works out beautifully, because they don't even notice most of the time when their beloved 'conservatives' turn around and suck their lifeblood.
I often think it is a lucky holdover from a more sensible era that we haven't privatized the roads. Then stuff like this comes along, and I start to get really scared for the future. If the Rick Perrys of the world really get what they want, and pull off the propaganda to support it too.. we're really f*cked for sure.
or even better, sterilize all felons.
we need to start looking at the impact individuals have on others and on our collective development process and thus our common future. the roots of social problems feed in an environment of selfishness and ignorance (as most victorian thinkers recognized). remove a chunk of the selfish who were pretty much unwanted anyway and I bet the cumulative effect would be enormous.
then we wouldn't need self driving cars so much.
I just want to cast my vote on the side that argues that killing animals and depriving of their lives is wrong, as wrong as it is to kill a person, with all the same complexities as that assertion implies.
I'm not trying ot get into a fruitless argument on the subject (I won't even be checking for replies) but I couldn't help but say something.
Though it will be interesting when machine consciousness arrives to see how that shakes up the 'smart enough to matter' debate. Then, hunting robots will perhaps be seen as a surprising irony.
my boss *whining*: I thought I had XP me *helpfully*: you have office XP boss: It says 2000. I want eksss-peeee...
Maybe if you listened for more than two seconds to anything.. god.. he's just like George Bush has been described- doesn't read anything, intentionally ignorant, can't tolerate dissent, judges the truth of what people say not on their evidence and reason but on their body language.
Could we be seeing the early stages of a genuine de-evolution?
You know, having lived in safe neighbourhoods full of people avoiding the underclass, and having also lived with the underclass, I've be absolutely dumbfounded at the totally different social worlds this creates.
It goes way beyond the 'no role models' mantra about kids in these poor neighbourhoods. The idea that someone can be more eveolved that cro-magnon debauchery and hierarchy is simply unreal to them. Not only that, but this primitivists culture cranks out more kids and at a younger age, partly because their parents don't spend hardly any time at all raising them, so why not?
How about this for a geeky solution- reinvade the bad neighbourhoods. Just being around and talking with your neighbours there makes a surprising difference.. but then, I suppose fearing for your life a little bit isn't for everyone. I guess you'll just have to reach for the technological solutions.
Ultimately, poor urban culture is going to be the majority culture in our society if we don't do anything. It's taboo to consider, but the sooner we tackle this fact, the better off we'd be. I'd support technological solutions such as sterilization. If costs something like $20,000 a year to attempt educate a kid, an effort that probably will fail if he is from the anti-intellectual poor american culture.
Instead, why not pay poor youth to be permanently sterilized for half what their 4 kids would have cost us - $40,000 a year for 12 years. We'd save money and be able to focus our precious non-monetary resources on kids who are actually wanted.
While effective, getting a dog to defend your social group hasn't been high-tech for at least 10,000 years.:) I think it's great you rescued your dog though. I've done lots of volunteer work for shelters but now focus on spaying an neutering because the overpopulation problem is absolutely overwhelming.
The breeders make it worse by cranking out more animals when thousands are being gassed every day. In the United States the number is roughly 2 million cats and dogs euthanised every year. Here in Houston, Texas, it's over 120,000 in city limits alone.
Interestingly, the numbers that breeders crank out to sell for profit are almost the same as the number euthanised.
To add insult to injury, I'd say from extensive personal experience that 1/3 to 1/2 of the animals put down in shelters are pure breed or at least appear to be.
Animals are conscious, feeling individuals, not products. The Geek Way is about bettering society and extending human ability through technology. Unless your dog is a rescue, and you make sure he is not lonely or bored, I don't see how having a dog for security could ever fit the positive view I like to maintain of the geek way of doing things..
Actually, since motion detection programs such as SupervisionCam (my favorite),Gotcha, &etc can automatically upload images to the internet, you still get images even if the equipment is stolen.
On my set up, detected motion turns lights on, plays sounds, turns on video monitors in bedroom, and wakes me up.
I am using a combination of USB webcams (low quality) and NTSC video cameras fed through cheap video input cards.
I live in a bad neighbourhood that is becoming a expensive neighbourhood, but in the meantime I have to deal with crack whores, dealers, and thiefs that walk my streets constantly day and night. Just the fact that the 'community' knows I have cameras it a huge help.
Very tall fences have been important also. Dogs contained in them work, but most people don't take good care of their dogs, who become bored and lonely, which I think is a cruel thing to inflict on a conscious being. Instead, I have an old partially blown set of Labtec speakers with a microwave-sized subwoofer hooked up to my video motion detection machine. It makes a very believable bark that is triggered by the video motion detection. I can also use to play a shotgun-cocking noise to scare people off.:)
Video motion detection actually works wonderfully well if carefully aimed. Any change in the picture pretty much sets them off, so you have to avoid looking at wind-blown shadows (if you monitor during the day), walls that headlights sweep across (at night), and close encounters with cats, lizards, and even spiders.
If you want human motion, I've found the it best to avoid the 'god's eye view' people often want to use for cameras, because from that perspective the cross section of a person is much smaller. The best set up is looking at a mostly monochromatic wall from about 10-20 feet, with the camera about 4 feet off the ground.
For video motion detection, also make sure the area is well lit at night. I've been amazed at how effectively compact flourescents (which are cheap) light up an area if spaced about every 6 feet. They make things much clearer than you would expect for the number of lumens on the packages, especially compared to using a single very bright outdoor light as people often want to do.
Sodium vapor lights may not cast a shadow for the human eye, but I've found they do a very poor job all round at illuminating a scene for video camera.
An old woman I know was being broken into every few days. The thief would take $20 here, $65 there.. I set up a video motion detection system at her place, and we got nice clear shots of him breaking into her car, her house, etc.. and clear close ups of his face. She sent this into crime stoppers, and someone recognized the man. When the police visited his house, he had 'left town'..:) But he never came back again.:)
I am curious to hear other people's experiences with this technology... You know, someday it could become common enough that thiefs would just assume that they will be recorded if they set foot on someone's property.. imagine what that would do to the rate of break-ins.:)
I'd like to see cops wear cameras 100% of the time too, but that's another topic...
Employers are pretty good at working together to lower wages and benefits. If we as employees could have half as much solidarity and less short term kiss-ass we'd all be much futher along. Workers rights are achieved only by fighting for them, and that's the only inevitablity here.
It's a big waste of our time to keep using senseless languages. Esperanto is fully developed, totally consistent, and consequently actually more expressive than languages like english.
Even if it had no economic value whatsoever, education clearly is vital to encouraging people to behave less like primates. Try living in a genuinely bad neighbourhood like mine, where nearly all the population is unable to even read and write.
Here you don't see curiousity about the world, individual free thought, value for beauty, etc. Instead you see dominance hierarchies established by threatening behaviour, rigid conformity to group values, competition for and near ownership of women, and zero human progress.
We seem to forget what people in the past were trying counteract when they established education that included literature, logic, and philosophy.
Our god-worship of the market tries to reduce everything to its immediate value in economic terms. I say, create decent people who value things for their own sake, and economic success will follow.
For what it's worth, it seems like from my studies and from visiting Russia, tha the soviet architects missed this fundamental point too. Only Gorbachev seemed to realize the importance of establishing a society of quality persons, but his efforts to ban vodka, etc, did not come to much.
I'd like to agree with you for the most part as an american and further elaborate. I believe the main reason for our current decline is this idea that everyone is evil, so it's ok if I'm evil to get my share.
It's a corrosive, nasty idea that contradicts the lessons of our history. The late victorian culture here was largely one of cooperation, self regulated kindness towards others, and a concept of justice. Sure, it was deeply flawed in many ways, what with its exceptions for black people, and a lingering tradition of hierarchy, but if you focus in on the actions of individuals and how they treated each other, there was a fundamental difference from the mainstream one today.
Unfortunately, immigration from places that did not practise the same cooperative traditions brought in plenty of people to take advantage and much up the existing system. Today, take for example the way people act in Oklahoma or Minnesota and compare it with New York, LA, Houston, or Chicago.
Once I was driving through Oklahoma and pulled over to the side of the freeway. People kept stopping every few minutes to see if I was ok or needed help! I had to leave so they'd quit stopping! Sorry guys, but this really busts the theory that all people are always selfish. What could they possibly gain by pulling over?
Tasmania in Australia is another example of a somewhat intact Victorian-Enlightenment reformed society. You ask for directions there and people offer to drive you where you're going. Nice.
Why do we complicate things by oversimplifying? People aren't selfish, they're needful. If their basic needs are met, they'll probably end up being mean to get what they need. However, if their needs are pretty much met, they can and will start to look after the needs of others.
(I know what I said above is simplified too, but I believe quite accurate since it describes the average)
Ultimately, we need to do what the enlightenment and their followers tried to do- pull together enough people to establish a consensus view that cooperation is important, and then band together to ruthlessly work against those who refuse to cooperate. Such a system need not be fragile. If someone is clearly an asshole, don't help them out. If someone is clearly treating others with concern, do the same towards them. Easy.
The assumption that everyone will be selfish and greedy is just an excuse to be so yourself. Thoughtful and kind people should conciously band together to work against selfish people.
Slashdot Mirror
long live freezepop
If people keep using computers in the same ways they do now, I agree. How much work will we really have in 10 years replacing hard drives, fixing registries, and un-SNAFUing basic netowrks? On the other hand, if people continue to find more and more things to do with computers- continue to have more and more data to manage and cross-connect, deploy more capable systems, video motion detection, wearable computers with continuous video recording, phone recording and indexing, or who knows what- this would counteract the trend you describe. I wonder if we will see a huge increase in automation- automated grocery stores that stock themselves and check out via RFID, automated fast food restaurants that crank out pizzas, burgers (veggie hopefully if you ask me), etc.. There could be a whole new round of techie hiring were this to happen.. I'm not sure society could handle the sudden reduction of legitimate jobs for the uneducated though.
I like how it is now taboo to say anything bad about lower class people, or people of other cultures (not implying these are consistently the same thing), without being branded as a bigot. The initial idea, from what I can tell, was to say that it is wrong to simplify reality and assume that eveyone in a certain culture or group is the same way. That's clearly wrong and seems to fit better the idea 'bigot'. However, it is dangerously ignoring reality to try to say that anyone who states that MANY people in a given class or culture do something similar is being bigoted.. The original side note did seem a little off topic though. Just like those I-got-mine conservative people who drive slow in the left lane and refuse to follow slow-traffic-keep-right. They're real asswipes who probably use no-name cabling and buy microsoft products.
I've thought about this too. Here in the US, I teach introduction to computers at the community college level. Textbooks have reached the point that they cost more than the tuition for the class! So, you could more than halve the cost of an introduction to computers class for low income people here, not to memtion the benefits for people in your situation.
_ text_project
Sure, there are many partial haphazard resources out there already, but as far as I've seen, no coherent, organised single source textbook for us to gather around.
If we have maybe 12 people each write a chapter, say one on input devices, one on the various formats and kinds of disk storage, another on basic internet applications, etc, then maybe have one or two people lay out the pages and find photos, maybe other people contributing the 'infographic' illustrations.. it wouldn't be an unreasonable amount of work for each, and given the dubious quality of the commercial equivalent, we could easily outdue the other offerings out there in quality and with-it-ness.
Everyone involved could be well credited on the title page, but it would be very important that everyone undertstood that this would be a permanently and fully non-profit effort.
Additionaly, it would give us a chance to counter the microsoft-toadying theme of many of the commercial texts.
Updates would be important, so we'd have to organise a way to continually maintain the digital textbook, keeping it current, while keeping in mind the teachability of the text..
We could build the textbook in a modular way, so that each instructor could choose the segments that match their student's software, equipment, and skill level. Each segment would be complete with text, links for further reading, and a couple different kinds of assignments. In-class and hands on projects would be a nice addition too.
That's what I've been thinking, but such projects seem to work best with a combination of collective decision making and individual initiative.
Ok, many of us see the need for this, so let's do it! I've set up a yahoo group for us to get together on this. The first order of business will be to decide how we will go about the project (wiki/ not wiki, whose webspace, etc) and then, to work out a general outline of what chapters are essential to such a text (additional subject could always be welcomed), then to divvy up the initial chapters and get at it!
Many of this have seen the need for this for a long time. Let's do something about it together.
Group name: community_computers_text_project
Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/community_computers
Group email: community_computers_text_project@yahoogroups.com
My dad was using his 10 watt analog bag phone on Cingular here in Texas up until early this year (when he bought the phone they were still GTE).. The reps offered him nice new free phones to get rid of the old one, but they didn't force him to give it up. So I imagine if you can find someone who refuses to upgrade you could potentially start paying their bill. :)
agreed... you might like my website, www.houstonrodeo.org
So I guess you don't like my website, www.houstonrodeo.org
sorry, couldn't resist the plug..
where it's above 85 half the year. :)
I'm surprised that no own has discussed the idea sometimes called 'downshifting'. You know, it's not a requirement of life to have a beige condo, a mortgaged car, and dependent wife- although you might get sucked into those things in reverse order if you fall under the wrong person's spell. :)
;), baking your own bread, and building stuff with dumpster-dived lumber.
From my perspective, there is plenty to make life sweet, purposeful, and meaningful without bringing in big money.. things like the public library, a directional wifi antenna
Looking at the last 1000 years, someone living in a relatively simply way in the modern west, and working part time still has options for living far beyond what most of humankind felt pretty happy with during most of that time. To put it another way, how would you feel towards the person of the future who essentially asked 'Should I quit my job? I'd be giving up my 5000 square foot home, I'd have to learn to use a kitchen, and start wearing clothes more than once, so I guess that's not really an option. I better have another job lined up first.'?..
They missed Houston, which is slightly larger than Chicago. Not cool, but everyone since Jeanne Michiel Jarre seems to make the same omission.
I wish I could find the specific show, but this is documented somewhere in the vast vault of kpftarchive.org. A woman and animal rights activist I know fairly well was stopped in the Houston, Texas airport after returning from overseas with her parents. She was seperated from her parents by armed guards, held for hours, and had to wait for the local FBI / sheriff person to show up. Turns out this person has been attending demonstrations undercover for years. The key detail is that this woman, and everyone else in the Houston animal rights community, is strictly dedicated to non-violence and legal, peaceful, non-sidewalk blocking demonstrations. She's specifically taken on some powerful scum, such as Charles Hurwitz. The FBI agent vaguely threatened her, and mentioned details that according to the woman in question could only have been gained by listening to her private telephone calls. Then, the tactics changed, and the agent began to offer her college tuition or even cash for turning informant (not withstanding the fact that there is actually nothing for her to inform about). She declined. Finally, several hours later she was released. She had committed no crime, was not involved in the investigation of any crime, and was never given good reason as to why she had been held. It seems that just mere connection with a peaceful, unpopular cause is enough to be threatened. In fact, an agent (possibly the same one) once told me that 'you'd be surprised what you can do to someone without ever pressing charges' - a clear threat. She bravely went on the radio the next day to tell everyone what had happened. I imagine most people just keep quiet.
teachers make a small impact. so do small organized non-profit groups. here in houston, texas, at least there is SOMEONE to protest halliburton so the press can carry the story.
I can say from experience that an activist groups with 3-4 committed members, and 20+ occasional supporters can appear to be a larger group, and can make an impact in legislation and public opinion. for example, a handful of activists groups here in Texas got horse slaughter outlawed, among a slew of other laws. And the esperanto society of houston has made many thousands of people aware of esperanto and trained dozens.. talk about a hard sell in texas!
This is the same Rick Perry that was elected as an 'aw shucks' farmer to be agriculture commissioner then turned around and gave Archer Daniel Midland the right to grade all Texas peanuts, including their own, pissing off the otherwise republicna voting farmers aware enough to notice. Of course guess who effectively paid for his campaign? Corruption goes beyond ideology. It's pretty much always bad. The republican base seems to be mainly people like these farmers and ranchers, who are vulnerable to a flag draped propoganda machine such as the republicans have skillfully builr. They're vulnerable because they're uninformed, and it works out beautifully, because they don't even notice most of the time when their beloved 'conservatives' turn around and suck their lifeblood. I often think it is a lucky holdover from a more sensible era that we haven't privatized the roads. Then stuff like this comes along, and I start to get really scared for the future. If the Rick Perrys of the world really get what they want, and pull off the propaganda to support it too.. we're really f*cked for sure.
or even better, sterilize all felons. we need to start looking at the impact individuals have on others and on our collective development process and thus our common future. the roots of social problems feed in an environment of selfishness and ignorance (as most victorian thinkers recognized). remove a chunk of the selfish who were pretty much unwanted anyway and I bet the cumulative effect would be enormous. then we wouldn't need self driving cars so much.
I just want to cast my vote on the side that argues that killing animals and depriving of their lives is wrong, as wrong as it is to kill a person, with all the same complexities as that assertion implies.
I'm not trying ot get into a fruitless argument on the subject (I won't even be checking for replies) but I couldn't help but say something.
Though it will be interesting when machine consciousness arrives to see how that shakes up the 'smart enough to matter' debate. Then, hunting robots will perhaps be seen as a surprising irony.
my boss *whining*: I thought I had XP
me *helpfully*: you have office XP
boss: It says 2000. I want eksss-peeee...
Maybe if you listened for more than two seconds to anything.. god.. he's just like George Bush has been described- doesn't read anything, intentionally ignorant, can't tolerate dissent, judges the truth of what people say not on their evidence and reason but on their body language.
Could we be seeing the early stages of a genuine de-evolution?
Hmm.. yeah actually :)
You know, having lived in safe neighbourhoods full of people avoiding the underclass, and having also lived with the underclass, I've be absolutely dumbfounded at the totally different social worlds this creates.
It goes way beyond the 'no role models' mantra about kids in these poor neighbourhoods. The idea that someone can be more eveolved that cro-magnon debauchery and hierarchy is simply unreal to them. Not only that, but this primitivists culture cranks out more kids and at a younger age, partly because their parents don't spend hardly any time at all raising them, so why not?
How about this for a geeky solution- reinvade the bad neighbourhoods. Just being around and talking with your neighbours there makes a surprising difference.. but then, I suppose fearing for your life a little bit isn't for everyone. I guess you'll just have to reach for the technological solutions.
Ultimately, poor urban culture is going to be the majority culture in our society if we don't do anything. It's taboo to consider, but the sooner we tackle this fact, the better off we'd be. I'd support technological solutions such as sterilization. If costs something like $20,000 a year to attempt educate a kid, an effort that probably will fail if he is from the anti-intellectual poor american culture.
Instead, why not pay poor youth to be permanently sterilized for half what their 4 kids would have cost us - $40,000 a year for 12 years. We'd save money and be able to focus our precious non-monetary resources on kids who are actually wanted.
While effective, getting a dog to defend your social group hasn't been high-tech for at least 10,000 years. :) I think it's great you rescued your dog though. I've done lots of volunteer work for shelters but now focus on spaying an neutering because the overpopulation problem is absolutely overwhelming.
The breeders make it worse by cranking out more animals when thousands are being gassed every day. In the United States the number is roughly 2 million cats and dogs euthanised every year. Here in Houston, Texas, it's over 120,000 in city limits alone.
Interestingly, the numbers that breeders crank out to sell for profit are almost the same as the number euthanised.
To add insult to injury, I'd say from extensive personal experience that 1/3 to 1/2 of the animals put down in shelters are pure breed or at least appear to be.
Animals are conscious, feeling individuals, not products. The Geek Way is about bettering society and extending human ability through technology. Unless your dog is a rescue, and you make sure he is not lonely or bored, I don't see how having a dog for security could ever fit the positive view I like to maintain of the geek way of doing things..
Actually, since motion detection programs such as SupervisionCam (my favorite),Gotcha, &etc can automatically upload images to the internet, you still get images even if the equipment is stolen.
:)
:) But he never came back again. :)
:)
On my set up, detected motion turns lights on, plays sounds, turns on video monitors in bedroom, and wakes me up.
I am using a combination of USB webcams (low quality) and NTSC video cameras fed through cheap video input cards.
I live in a bad neighbourhood that is becoming a expensive neighbourhood, but in the meantime I have to deal with crack whores, dealers, and thiefs that walk my streets constantly day and night. Just the fact that the 'community' knows I have cameras it a huge help.
Very tall fences have been important also. Dogs contained in them work, but most people don't take good care of their dogs, who become bored and lonely, which I think is a cruel thing to inflict on a conscious being. Instead, I have an old partially blown set of Labtec speakers with a microwave-sized subwoofer hooked up to my video motion detection machine. It makes a very believable bark that is triggered by the video motion detection. I can also use to play a shotgun-cocking noise to scare people off.
Video motion detection actually works wonderfully well if carefully aimed. Any change in the picture pretty much sets them off, so you have to avoid looking at wind-blown shadows (if you monitor during the day), walls that headlights sweep across (at night), and close encounters with cats, lizards, and even spiders.
If you want human motion, I've found the it best to avoid the 'god's eye view' people often want to use for cameras, because from that perspective the cross section of a person is much smaller. The best set up is looking at a mostly monochromatic wall from about 10-20 feet, with the camera about 4 feet off the ground.
For video motion detection, also make sure the area is well lit at night. I've been amazed at how effectively compact flourescents (which are cheap) light up an area if spaced about every 6 feet. They make things much clearer than you would expect for the number of lumens on the packages, especially compared to using a single very bright outdoor light as people often want to do.
Sodium vapor lights may not cast a shadow for the human eye, but I've found they do a very poor job all round at illuminating a scene for video camera.
An old woman I know was being broken into every few days. The thief would take $20 here, $65 there.. I set up a video motion detection system at her place, and we got nice clear shots of him breaking into her car, her house, etc.. and clear close ups of his face. She sent this into crime stoppers, and someone recognized the man. When the police visited his house, he had 'left town'..
I am curious to hear other people's experiences with this technology... You know, someday it could become common enough that thiefs would just assume that they will be recorded if they set foot on someone's property.. imagine what that would do to the rate of break-ins.
I'd like to see cops wear cameras 100% of the time too, but that's another topic...
Employers are pretty good at working together to lower wages and benefits. If we as employees could have half as much solidarity and less short term kiss-ass we'd all be much futher along. Workers rights are achieved only by fighting for them, and that's the only inevitablity here.
It's a big waste of our time to keep using senseless languages. Esperanto is fully developed, totally consistent, and consequently actually more expressive than languages like english.
http://www.esperanto-usa.org/
Even if it had no economic value whatsoever, education clearly is vital to encouraging people to behave less like primates. Try living in a genuinely bad neighbourhood like mine, where nearly all the population is unable to even read and write.
Here you don't see curiousity about the world, individual free thought, value for beauty, etc. Instead you see dominance hierarchies established by threatening behaviour, rigid conformity to group values, competition for and near ownership of women, and zero human progress.
We seem to forget what people in the past were trying counteract when they established education that included literature, logic, and philosophy. Our god-worship of the market tries to reduce everything to its immediate value in economic terms. I say, create decent people who value things for their own sake, and economic success will follow.
For what it's worth, it seems like from my studies and from visiting Russia, tha the soviet architects missed this fundamental point too. Only Gorbachev seemed to realize the importance of establishing a society of quality persons, but his efforts to ban vodka, etc, did not come to much.
I'd like to agree with you for the most part as an american and further elaborate. I believe the main reason for our current decline is this idea that everyone is evil, so it's ok if I'm evil to get my share.
It's a corrosive, nasty idea that contradicts the lessons of our history. The late victorian culture here was largely one of cooperation, self regulated kindness towards others, and a concept of justice. Sure, it was deeply flawed in many ways, what with its exceptions for black people, and a lingering tradition of hierarchy, but if you focus in on the actions of individuals and how they treated each other, there was a fundamental difference from the mainstream one today.
Unfortunately, immigration from places that did not practise the same cooperative traditions brought in plenty of people to take advantage and much up the existing system. Today, take for example the way people act in Oklahoma or Minnesota and compare it with New York, LA, Houston, or Chicago.
Once I was driving through Oklahoma and pulled over to the side of the freeway. People kept stopping every few minutes to see if I was ok or needed help! I had to leave so they'd quit stopping! Sorry guys, but this really busts the theory that all people are always selfish. What could they possibly gain by pulling over?
Tasmania in Australia is another example of a somewhat intact Victorian-Enlightenment reformed society. You ask for directions there and people offer to drive you where you're going. Nice.
Why do we complicate things by oversimplifying? People aren't selfish, they're needful. If their basic needs are met, they'll probably end up being mean to get what they need. However, if their needs are pretty much met, they can and will start to look after the needs of others.
(I know what I said above is simplified too, but I believe quite accurate since it describes the average)
Ultimately, we need to do what the enlightenment and their followers tried to do- pull together enough people to establish a consensus view that cooperation is important, and then band together to ruthlessly work against those who refuse to cooperate. Such a system need not be fragile. If someone is clearly an asshole, don't help them out. If someone is clearly treating others with concern, do the same towards them. Easy.
The assumption that everyone will be selfish and greedy is just an excuse to be so yourself. Thoughtful and kind people should conciously band together to work against selfish people.