I bought a house in a questionable neighbourhood in Houston, Texas and have since been privileged to see another slice of American society that doesn't get much attention.
Sadly, I'm afraid that a frighteningly large bit of the US population simply does not have the mental equipment to make good use of the internet. For starters, mostof the people I speak to in my neighbourhooddo not even know what the internet is. I repeat, they don't even understand what it does. Most of them get their idea of it from movies, with predictable results. When I tell them I work with computers, they ask me if I will (not if I can) fake their criminal records and stuff.
One woman threw a holy fit when I was talking with her one day (listening really, since she basically talks to herself all of the time) about how the government routinely spends big bucks 'sending mice into cyberspace' instead of public housing and basic services. While I can partially see her point, this and her further harangue represents an amazing entanglement of ideas. She genuinely thought people used live mice when working on computers and that all computers are somehow tied into NASA.
Even if these people could get online, they wouldn't be able to do much because they can't comprehend the written word as has been mentioned here by others. Many of those in my neck of the woods primarily speak a texan form of spanish and are unable to read and write standard spanish. I've spoken with a few older people who were born in texas but grew up speaking tejano spanish who have told me they don't watch Telemundo or other national spanish stations because they can't understand the spanish. This represents another bubble of society separate from the literate, internet surfing world.
Among the immigrant community I have to say that the intelligence level is comparable to any IT department I've worked in. (and no that's not a backhanded compliment:) ).. for them it's just a matter of education. On the other hand, the second and third generational people living in the de-evolved urban landscape are definitely below average. Someone writing about the dramatically lower IQ tests in these areas called these folks the 'societal residue' left behind when everyone else has moved out and paid up to live in nicer neighbourhoods to get away from them. As a leftist it's hard for me to come to this conclusion, but observation dictates to me that it is pretty accurate.
So the 'societal residue' don't get on the internet because it's beyond their sad, run down world... and all the folks who could show them a little peephole into a better world have segregated themselves into safer, insulated places where they don't get robbed all the time. I can't say I blame them.
The truly unfortunate subpart of the story is that these 'peeps' have tons of kids. Try this exercise- really get to know one of the top 10 metro regions in the united states. Now take a map of the city and a crayon and start shading in all the areas that are dangerous, filled with substandard housing, and mainly ignorant people. The apparition that appears is frightening. In Houston if you account for population density you come up with somewhere between a quarter and half of the city falling into this category. Granted, this is part of why Houston sucks so badly, but I'd wager many, many other cities aren't far behind.
The digital divide is just a sign of the far deeper stratification of our society.
I can't say I'm as unhappy with Scientific American these days as you folks. I've read it for 15 years and am still pleased with it. Sheesh, it's not like they're running stories on Alien Autoposy investigators who smoke PCPs to understand perpetual motion machines, like Omni.
However, it does give one pause.. a de-evolved future has often been pictured as one in which people were blatantly more sensationalistic and less wise. What if, instead, the flashiness and beautiful presentation of information in the future made everyone imagine they were smarter and wiser than people of the past even as the population slips gradually into ignorance? Sadly, this seems all too plausible.
Of course, it all depends on who you consider in your evaluation. Victorian intellectuals were very, very sharp, but also a very, very small part of the world's population. Today the overall percentage of the population that are well educated and thoughtful is much higher. Perhaps because there are more people in this category, it appears that intellectual standards have slipped.
However you count it up, a fact that seems to be generally ignored is that the vast majority of humans, perhaps also a sizable chunk of people in developed nations, are pretty much unaware of pretty much everything. So maybe the rising tide of sensationalism is a symptom more of the movement of more and more people into intellectualism, rather than a sign of the decline of intellectualism.. or perhaps in the short run this is all the same thing.. man.. reality.. it's so damn complicated!
Considering there are other effective alternatives, I feel the choice to eat only animals and animal products is a very cruel one. While a vegetarian diet would cause the least suffering, doubling or tripling the number of individuals you personally are pulling through the slaughterhouse is pretty heartless considering the only motivation for doing so is to drop a few pounds.
Doesn't it take a surface mount soldering job to change processor chips? I had to do this to change the chipset on my lat Soyo board, I bought the new one but the mounts were different, had to resolder every chip. I didn't even see a processor. Maybe I don't know what that is. Anyway, all I wanted was to run my GEOS based C64 emulator faster, which beats KDE and any other linux GUI hands down in every respect. This might not be true of Windows 95 though. I haven't tried that yet. Does that require soldering?
I just don't get it.
species desire?
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Can a species have a desire?
We tend to put way too much meaning into things, and this results in a misreading of evolution. Likely, things just worked out this way because they were more successful. Full stop. They weren't designed, they didn't actively want anything, and there was no purpose. Did the earth's crust desire to have continents because otherwise there would be no land?
I think this is hardest thing we have with comprehending consciousness. The only requirement is that it is functional, not that it has meaning.
That doesn't neccesarily mean that we can't talk about the ethical treatment due to our fellow entities capable of self knowledge. Rather it just means that we need to work a little harder to shed our religiously derived logic to see things clearly.
universal urge to proceate? uh, no
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The people I know who have kids or are getting married and spending thier lives getting ready to have kids would agree with you. The people I know who have their lives fully taken up by other things have never expressed any urge o procreate. In fact if they are committed to other purposes they usually say they fear having kids because it would interfere with their other goals.
I'd say humans tend to think their purpose is life is whatever they've decded it is.
Not that we couldn't debate which decisions make more sense or are more meaningful..
People who don't want kids are treated kind of weird by people who do.. I guess the former invalidates the belief of the latter in the universality of their own self chosen purpose.
That is a damn fine movie. Playful yet intelligent, silly and imaginative, a fantasy of what computers might have been for a time before we new what they were..
Also, as the onion AVclub reviewer said, 'the first movie to explore the dangerous libidinal energy of computers'..
I have been learning esperanto and I have to say that it rocks! It's much more expressive than other languages and FAR easier to learn and use correctly. It actually makes rational sense, which makes it unlikely to become unintelligible over time (many dialects form because the original way to say something was arbitrary anyway while rules have tended to stay put, like the -ed past tense suffix in many indo-european languages).
At the same time, because it is so rational you can easily add words and alter words for shades of meaning using a universal system of prefixes and affixes. It is an exciting mental challenge to speak in esperanto because of the degreee of creativity you can use and still be clearly understood. You can change word order for emphasis, as one example. Not the same way, spoken language of english is!
It also has some neat modern features like a consistent verb formation of the hypothetical and formation for the rational reasons explaining things. Ancient languages that evolved from a time before people did much speculating and reasoning use strange kludgy adapted verb forms for these things.
In my experience, nearly everyone who puts down esperanto doesn't really understand what they are arguing against. It is a language well ahead of 'natural' languages.
why mod up all the anti animal rights posts?
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 1
come on guys, we could do with a little fairness.
then again, this discussion isn't one that is likely to get past the many people who post here who appear to think that arrogance makes them more right.
i've noticed that compassion and arrogance generally don't mix very often.
I've gone through all the major sub $99 brands of capture cards in the last year and have a small bit of advice to offer:
Get an ATI Tv Wonder.
The All in Wonder is cool too, but much more expensive (but does include TV video out unlike the Wonder). They both include an internet-updated program guide for FREE, which lets you select any show and hit the record program to schedule its recording. Other than lacking TV out and S-Video, the TV Wonder does everything the All-in-Wonder can do.
The ATI cards also have a geeky cool feature that shows you what is on EVERY channel at once. Sure, it's hard to make out all 80 channels on my machine, but it sure is cool to see them all. They don't move though, the system runs through and updates one channel at a time, taking about a full minute to cycle through.
Also, like many cards you can capture close captioning to text files, but unlike many cards the ATI software can create HTML files of any show's text with periodic images plugged in.
Oh yeah, and if you set your video recording to the right format, you can burn all your shows onto plain old CDR VCDs that can be viewed by many DVD players.
Sadly, there is no way to pause live TV.
Avermedia's TV tuner cards can be programmed to record at particular times, but there is no program guide.. and the quality is disapointing. The resolution is much lower, which makes them useless for other purposes a video input card can be put to like video motion detection.
The Hauppage cards I've tried work well but don't have the feature happy options ATI works in. A useful thing about them for some purposes however is that you can have multiple cards in the same machine, which doesn't seem to be true for the ATI TV Wonder or the AverMedia cards.
Here in Texas junkyard fortress phones sell for about $50, which is mostly for the aluminium. At one scrapyard I frequent, the pile is truly enormous.
I bodged up a phreaky mailbox to dissuade my neighbours from stealing my mail every other day. It's actually not that hard to do, just add a door, a lock, and a mailslot. You can't beat it for style... a mailbox Captain Crunch would be proud to call his own.
In my case I chose an old psuedo-victorian pedestal phone booth and set the thing in 400 lbs of black dyed concrete, even covering the bolts. It looks very cool, and nobody steals my mail anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a house in a questionable neighbourhood in Houston, Texas and have since been privileged to see another slice of American society that doesn't get much attention.
:) ).. for them it's just a matter of education. On the other hand, the second and third generational people living in the de-evolved urban landscape are definitely below average. Someone writing about the dramatically lower IQ tests in these areas called these folks the 'societal residue' left behind when everyone else has moved out and paid up to live in nicer neighbourhoods to get away from them. As a leftist it's hard for me to come to this conclusion, but observation dictates to me that it is pretty accurate.
Sadly, I'm afraid that a frighteningly large bit of the US population simply does not have the mental equipment to make good use of the internet. For starters, mostof the people I speak to in my neighbourhooddo not even know what the internet is. I repeat, they don't even understand what it does. Most of them get their idea of it from movies, with predictable results. When I tell them I work with computers, they ask me if I will (not if I can) fake their criminal records and stuff.
One woman threw a holy fit when I was talking with her one day (listening really, since she basically talks to herself all of the time) about how the government routinely spends big bucks 'sending mice into cyberspace' instead of public housing and basic services. While I can partially see her point, this and her further harangue represents an amazing entanglement of ideas. She genuinely thought people used live mice when working on computers and that all computers are somehow tied into NASA.
Even if these people could get online, they wouldn't be able to do much because they can't comprehend the written word as has been mentioned here by others. Many of those in my neck of the woods primarily speak a texan form of spanish and are unable to read and write standard spanish. I've spoken with a few older people who were born in texas but grew up speaking tejano spanish who have told me they don't watch Telemundo or other national spanish stations because they can't understand the spanish. This represents another bubble of society separate from the literate, internet surfing world.
Among the immigrant community I have to say that the intelligence level is comparable to any IT department I've worked in. (and no that's not a backhanded compliment
So the 'societal residue' don't get on the internet because it's beyond their sad, run down world... and all the folks who could show them a little peephole into a better world have segregated themselves into safer, insulated places where they don't get robbed all the time. I can't say I blame them.
The truly unfortunate subpart of the story is that these 'peeps' have tons of kids. Try this exercise- really get to know one of the top 10 metro regions in the united states. Now take a map of the city and a crayon and start shading in all the areas that are dangerous, filled with substandard housing, and mainly ignorant people. The apparition that appears is frightening. In Houston if you account for population density you come up with somewhere between a quarter and half of the city falling into this category. Granted, this is part of why Houston sucks so badly, but I'd wager many, many other cities aren't far behind.
The digital divide is just a sign of the far deeper stratification of our society.
I can't say I'm as unhappy with Scientific American these days as you folks. I've read it for 15 years and am still pleased with it. Sheesh, it's not like they're running stories on Alien Autoposy investigators who smoke PCPs to understand perpetual motion machines, like Omni.
However, it does give one pause.. a de-evolved future has often been pictured as one in which people were blatantly more sensationalistic and less wise. What if, instead, the flashiness and beautiful presentation of information in the future made everyone imagine they were smarter and wiser than people of the past even as the population slips gradually into ignorance? Sadly, this seems all too plausible.
Of course, it all depends on who you consider in your evaluation. Victorian intellectuals were very, very sharp, but also a very, very small part of the world's population. Today the overall percentage of the population that are well educated and thoughtful is much higher. Perhaps because there are more people in this category, it appears that intellectual standards have slipped.
However you count it up, a fact that seems to be generally ignored is that the vast majority of humans, perhaps also a sizable chunk of people in developed nations, are pretty much unaware of pretty much everything. So maybe the rising tide of sensationalism is a symptom more of the movement of more and more people into intellectualism, rather than a sign of the decline of intellectualism.. or perhaps in the short run this is all the same thing.. man.. reality.. it's so damn complicated!
To echo another poster, James Burke's Connections series in the magazine was very cool, if short lived. Here is a link to a directory of them..
Considering there are other effective alternatives, I feel the choice to eat only animals and animal products is a very cruel one. While a vegetarian diet would cause the least suffering, doubling or tripling the number of individuals you personally are pulling through the slaughterhouse is pretty heartless considering the only motivation for doing so is to drop a few pounds.
I still don't understand.
Doesn't it take a surface mount soldering job to change processor chips? I had to do this to change the chipset on my lat Soyo board, I bought the new one but the mounts were different, had to resolder every chip. I didn't even see a processor. Maybe I don't know what that is. Anyway, all I wanted was to run my GEOS based C64 emulator faster, which beats KDE and any other linux GUI hands down in every respect. This might not be true of Windows 95 though. I haven't tried that yet. Does that require soldering?
I just don't get it.
Can a species have a desire?
We tend to put way too much meaning into things, and this results in a misreading of evolution. Likely, things just worked out this way because they were more successful. Full stop. They weren't designed, they didn't actively want anything, and there was no purpose. Did the earth's crust desire to have continents because otherwise there would be no land?
I think this is hardest thing we have with comprehending consciousness. The only requirement is that it is functional, not that it has meaning.
That doesn't neccesarily mean that we can't talk about the ethical treatment due to our fellow entities capable of self knowledge. Rather it just means that we need to work a little harder to shed our religiously derived logic to see things clearly.
The people I know who have kids or are getting married and spending thier lives getting ready to have kids would agree with you. The people I know who have their lives fully taken up by other things have never expressed any urge o procreate. In fact if they are committed to other purposes they usually say they fear having kids because it would interfere with their other goals.
I'd say humans tend to think their purpose is life is whatever they've decded it is.
Not that we couldn't debate which decisions make more sense or are more meaningful..
People who don't want kids are treated kind of weird by people who do.. I guess the former invalidates the belief of the latter in the universality of their own self chosen purpose.
That is a damn fine movie. Playful yet intelligent, silly and imaginative, a fantasy of what computers might have been for a time before we new what they were..
:)
Also, as the onion AVclub reviewer said, 'the first movie to explore the dangerous libidinal energy of computers'..
Hmm, might have to put it up on Kazaa
I have been learning esperanto and I have to say that it rocks! It's much more expressive than other languages and FAR easier to learn and use correctly. It actually makes rational sense, which makes it unlikely to become unintelligible over time (many dialects form because the original way to say something was arbitrary anyway while rules have tended to stay put, like the -ed past tense suffix in many indo-european languages). At the same time, because it is so rational you can easily add words and alter words for shades of meaning using a universal system of prefixes and affixes. It is an exciting mental challenge to speak in esperanto because of the degreee of creativity you can use and still be clearly understood. You can change word order for emphasis, as one example. Not the same way, spoken language of english is! It also has some neat modern features like a consistent verb formation of the hypothetical and formation for the rational reasons explaining things. Ancient languages that evolved from a time before people did much speculating and reasoning use strange kludgy adapted verb forms for these things. In my experience, nearly everyone who puts down esperanto doesn't really understand what they are arguing against. It is a language well ahead of 'natural' languages.
come on guys, we could do with a little fairness.
then again, this discussion isn't one that is likely to get past the many people who post here who appear to think that arrogance makes them more right.
i've noticed that compassion and arrogance generally don't mix very often.
I've gone through all the major sub $99 brands of capture cards in the last year and have a small bit of advice to offer:
Get an ATI Tv Wonder.
The All in Wonder is cool too, but much more expensive (but does include TV video out unlike the Wonder). They both include an internet-updated program guide for FREE, which lets you select any show and hit the record program to schedule its recording. Other than lacking TV out and S-Video, the TV Wonder does everything the All-in-Wonder can do.
The ATI cards also have a geeky cool feature that shows you what is on EVERY channel at once. Sure, it's hard to make out all 80 channels on my machine, but it sure is cool to see them all. They don't move though, the system runs through and updates one channel at a time, taking about a full minute to cycle through.
Also, like many cards you can capture close captioning to text files, but unlike many cards the ATI software can create HTML files of any show's text with periodic images plugged in.
Oh yeah, and if you set your video recording to the right format, you can burn all your shows onto plain old CDR VCDs that can be viewed by many DVD players.
Sadly, there is no way to pause live TV.
Avermedia's TV tuner cards can be programmed to record at particular times, but there is no program guide.. and the quality is disapointing. The resolution is much lower, which makes them useless for other purposes a video input card can be put to like video motion detection.
The Hauppage cards I've tried work well but don't have the feature happy options ATI works in. A useful thing about them for some purposes however is that you can have multiple cards in the same machine, which doesn't seem to be true for the ATI TV Wonder or the AverMedia cards.
Here in Texas junkyard fortress phones sell for about $50, which is mostly for the aluminium. At one scrapyard I frequent, the pile is truly enormous.
I bodged up a phreaky mailbox to dissuade my neighbours from stealing my mail every other day. It's actually not that hard to do, just add a door, a lock, and a mailslot. You can't beat it for style... a mailbox Captain Crunch would be proud to call his own.
In my case I chose an old psuedo-victorian pedestal phone booth and set the thing in 400 lbs of black dyed concrete, even covering the bolts. It looks very cool, and nobody steals my mail anymore.