You are right when you say lots of natural gas would be burned. Other misconceptions abound. What follows is very abbreviated. The cheap way to make paper is to cook it using the Kraft process. The wood gets chopped into small chunks and cooked in a liquor stew which separates the lignin from the nice fibers used for paper. The lignin holds the cells together and make the wood hard so the tree grows tall. Coming out of the stew the glop gets washed off the fibers. The chemicals used to cook the wood are expensive so the glop containing the lignin (which is bound to some of the chemicals) gets burned. The burning gets rid of the lignin carbohydrates and a stream of chemicals (called smelt) which runs out the bottom of the furnace, goes into a tank of water, comes out in a stream called green liquor, and eventually ends up going back into the cooking cycle. The heat from burning the lignin goes, as slarabee describes, into turbines to make electricity and steam for various purposes. Now, if you don't burn the lignin, you have to use some other source of energy to make that steam and electricity. Second, and the point the article misses completely, how are you going to separate the lignin from the chemicals? Those boilers in paper mills are called recovery boilers because they recover the chemicals. It's the cheapest way to do it. How is going to a more expensive method for chemical recovery and going to a more expensive fuel a good solution for anything? Lignin in a liquid wood would be better than plastic. The value of the liquid wood using lignin, though, would have to be high enough to overcome the above costs.
Computer software is deterministic, at least most software that people use. Computer hardware is supposed to be deterministic, but whereas software is a mental concept, hardware is an actualized "thing" manifested in reality. Whether a physical computer properly executes a program correctly is not a given, not in the same way as whether the software is logically correct. If reality were deterministic, then computer hardware would be deterministic by definition, it would part of a deterministic reality. If reality is not deterministic, then we can build good hardware and trust it to be deterministic with software. However, in this case we trust it based on knowledge and experience, we don't "know" that it is deterministic. Science is good stuff. Computers are good stuff. That is what I use all the time. It is just that science makes a few suppositions and then works on an understanding of reality. The suppositions are necessary to the definition of the framework, but the suppositions aren't guaranteed to be all-encompassing, just necessary for the framework. For example, science requires causality. No one has ever shown that causality is a strict part of the definition of reality, science assumes it and proceeds from there.
I agree that science has no problem with an extinct bear having cut a fart after having eaten an extinct moose. The requirement of evidence is also reasonable. Science works off evidence. What I said was that science sees the world through the glasses of evidence. If an aspect of reality does not follow the rules of evidence and logic, then it doesn't make it through the glasses. Science simply won't see it. This where the problem of determinism arises. If one takes the position that all of reality is strictly explainable, that reality is deterministic, then a price must be paid. There can be no responsibility in a deterministic reality, nor can there be beauty, love, or life. If instead reality were not deterministic, it does not mean that science is not a valid tool or that we should all follow voodoo mumbo-jumbo. A bat and a bear and a moth (with an elaborate sense of smell) would all have wildly different understandings of reality. All would have consistent systems that work just fine. None will ever perceive reality as the others do. A bear scientist might get a glimmering of the moth or bat's viewpoint, but a glimmering is about all it is ever going to get. Science is good stuff and we would be foolish to not use it, that doesn't mean it is the beginning and the end of everything.
If determinism means "that the result of an action can be predetermined", then how can it be that the behavior or outcome can be changed? Is there some time before an event which is a deadline? Before the deadline the event can be changed, after it the event is predetermined?
Computers, as hardware, are deterministic only if reality is deterministic. Terms such as "understanding" or "communicating" or "enjoying" have no meaning in determinism. Time, itself, has no meaning oddly enough. It doesn't matter whether or not we can predict something, the concept doesn't apply to determinism.
Determinism is viral. If one goes with the belief in it, then it gets into everything and nothing escapes.
Determinism is nasty stuff. One can never change anything. One cannot change behavior or outcomes. It does seem odd that we are here, enjoying life on this world, and communicating with each other, but apparently there is no reason to it at all. Even my perception, using words such as "enjoying" and "communicating", shows my lack of true understanding. Even "understanding" doesn't seem possible with determinism.
When you say "ID is useless because its principle simply contradict the way science work - it's not a model you can use to make any useful prediction at all.", you come to the crux of the problem. Science looks at reality through a type of glasses that only see things that are repeatable. If today on your way into work a bird smashed into your windshield, made a bloody mess the windshield wipers only made worse, you pulled over, and before you could fully stop the bird straightened its neck, staggered erect, and flew away, what would you think? Birds don't do this. There is still blood on your windshield. Eventually rain and car washes remove it. Did it really happen? Twenty years from now would you believed it happened or would you think you had been mistaken? Would you tell others?
The glasses science uses to view reality don't see things like this. It is not as if science could not work in such a reality. If one magical thing happened to each person once a year, science could easily go about it merry way.
Another thing the scientific glasses do not see is free will. In this case, though, those using the glasses refuse to live their lives based on what they see. They speak of responsibility, but if free will does not exist, then neither does responsibility.
Science is wonderful stuff, just limited. Many scientists understand this, many worshipers of science do not.
All the carbon in trees and paper and wood products came from the atmosphere. Timber companies constantly improve the genetics of trees so that they will grow faster. Some are now harvestable in six years. People should use wood products as much as possible, and if they end up in landfills that is also good. E-books are geeky to the intelligentsia who are always big on the latest fad, whether it helps the ecology or not seems to be a matter of who shouts the loudest to them.
The trick is to not use any gas at all. Take a sphere, say 10' in diameter. Use aerogel to make the surface of the sphere. Put a thin lightweight material on the outside. Take all the air out of the sphere. You'll need enough aerogel thickness to withstand atmospheric pressure. Voila, a sphere that is lighter than air with no hydrogen or helium. These things rise. The compressive strength of aerogel would determine the diameter or the thickness of the aerogel layer. A collection of these spheres would provide lots of lift. If the arrangement suffered a slow loss of vacuum, it would be possible to restore the vacuum inside sphere and put it back into service.
When I first heard about aerogel this struck me as the perfect use.
The Wikipedia article on aerogel shows it supporting a brick; it should have plenty of strength. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel
Thank you for an intelligent and meaningful response. I have no personal experience with a non-American university and was always under the impression that Russia and the East European countries had first-class educational systems. I have hired a couple of people from Slovakia and in general have been impressed. They are hard-working and quite smart. A third individual was only so-so.
There are a lot of different personality types and people learn in different ways. Occasionally people will speak of an influential teacher in their lives. They describe someone who connected with them on an intimate level. It doesn't happen for everyone and very rarely does an individual speak of the five or six influential teachers in their life. So, we take an individual, run them through four years or so of education, and maybe or maybe not the student clicks with a teacher. This is efficient?
To a large extent the students don't really care about school at that point. They see little benefit in it for them and hormones are an awful distraction. Learning is important to them, though they may not realize it. Evolution has designed them to be wide open to learning new things at that age. They will learn, they can't help it, they may just end up learning trivial things like how to download their favorite songs.
In general most people don't care about intellectual development. They care far more about their social interactions. A bunch of guys sitting around drinking beer and talking after a football game can actually be a very positive thing. A bunch of intellectuals sitting around and talking rarely impresses me as much.
Sadly I do care about intellectual development, very much so. My hostile reaction to universities is largely due to seeing the pretence and not the heart that should be there. It is possible to find interesting professors, one has to do a great deal of searching. A great deal. When a person is learning something and they are smart and their mind fully engaged, their thoughts run all over the place making all sorts of strange connections. They are like a colt with wonderful genetics, bursting forth with talent, so much so they can hardly contain it. Truth be told such colts need to be handled individually, not in a herd.
Few adults I meet have mental enthusiasm. It has been lost along the way. Few of the students that I've interviewed have had that enthusiasm, it was gone and they were still in school.
No, I appreciate that you care for your students and that there are other teachers out there who do. I also believe that there must be a better way because the current way is a disaster. Almost every company out there would be better off with a time machine that would let them go back a hundred years to hire graduates from back then. There is a lot such people would have to learn in this modern day and age, but it would be worth it.
A sister and a brother of mine teach the younger grades. They do good jobs and have a passion for helping their student. My sister is working on becoming a principle to be better able to fix the problems she sees with the system. A nephew plans on becoming an English professor. He will succeed in this and I fear he will be a professor that fits well into the current system.
I suspect I would enjoy taking a class from you. Thanks again for your response.
John
ps. Group learning can be done, militaries do it and often do it very well.
"This is one of the fundamental tenets of academic life: you do your own work."
You wrote a good response, with passion. Passion is worthy of a human being. That said, academic life and the college system is possibly the greatest scam yet seen by the human race. I look back in history and don't see that the academic system has anything to do with turning people into really neat people, leaders, shining examples to others, creative, etc. What is the point of an educational system that doesn't do its very best in these areas? What can it possibly be teaching that is more important?
I didn't go to college recently, going back in the early 70's. I have interviewed students for jobs since then. In the 70's the university classes were pointless. A school that puts students in a class with a TA who can't speak English does not care at all about the students. The professor of the course doesn't, the department doesn't, the faculty as a whole don't, and we end up at the administration which is in the same boat.
Various comments use the term "cheating". That can be an ethical term, it can also be used in a legal sense. In the first sense what complaint do universities have? They aren't interested in ethics or instilling ethics in their students. The institutions don't demonstrate ethical behavior themselves. Two easy examples, college football and the charming tendency for professors who are good teachers to be lower on the pecking order than hot-shot reeearchers with lots of publications. So the schools can't complain about the ethical aspect of cheating, ethics aren't part of their universe. They don't teach it, don't practice it, and organizations that do concentrate in the area, such as religions with strict moral codes, receive scorn and hostility.
That leaves us with the legal definition of cheating. Again, respect for law is not something that has been taught for years in higher education. Quite the contrary. Why should a university that teaches its students that law has only the authority given it by the individual be surprised when students chose to not follow academic rules?
I said I went to school in the 70's. The students I have interviewed since then seemed to have learned little. The ones with good grades are very good at scamming the system. The ones that don't cheat have often refined the talent of being able to pass tests. Two weeks later they have forgotten the vast majority of what was on the test. Six months later just about everything else is gone.
The scandal is in the waste of good years in people's lives. For the amount of money wasted on people going through the motions, it would be better to pay companies to teach the students on the job or in company run classes. Give the companies a tax credit. Some companies wouldn't do the students much good, but word would get around. Besides, would the students be worse off? The only thing they are getting now is a piece of paper; as I said earlier, one of the all-time great scams.
Big Brother lives by the same rules as the rest of the world. The most important of these is that manpower is expensive. This means that if people, on an individual basis, take extra time (only a minute or two) to fufill requests for information or call and ask some questions of a live person, then modern management will go nuts. Companies and organizations concentrate hard on reducing headcount and making things work more efficiently. Managers up and down the line are evaluated by these measurements. Bottom line employees are too. If you are in a grocery store and the checkout person wants some personal identification for some peaches or anything else, take an extra minute or two to give them the information. It's not hard, just ask a couple of questions about why they want it and make sure the explanation is clear.
This type of behavior causes lines to grow a little bit and things to run a little slower. Computers will notice this sort of thing and flag it. Does it mean the store has a lackadaisical manager who isn't hiring good people or is letting them slack off? The same applies to government organizations.
Much data is collected automatically. There is not much that can be done about that. However, the government has a different, but similar weakness. If you find the government is collecting some piece of information and you wish they would stop, call your representative or senator. Don't complain, just ask for an explanation about why it is needed. Insist on a good explanation. Elected officials have staffs and they cost money. As in most things some staffers are better than others. If voters start chewing up more staffer time the elected one will become unhappy. Hiring more staffers reduces quality which tends to give callers more bad experiences which leads to bad publicity.
Big Brother's weakness is that of every other organization, the bottom line, whether it be money or influence or elected position. Every organization stares at its bottom line for lack of a navel. It takes very little change to catch their notice.
People learn a sytem that works and develop a vested interest in it. Humans are much more emotional than rational, even scientists. If someone challenges that system because it seems "ugly" they get jumped on good. Whether a system works or "is correct" depends on perception. DDT works; Ptolemaic astronomy worked very well for a long time; blind cave fish have an understanding of reality that is complete, consistent, and works.
Many people don't think much of modern physics, it comes across as "ugly". Acolytes might refer to its beauty. Just because something seems to work is not a reason to like it or to not attack it at every possibility. After all, the pursuit of beauty is a worthwhile goal for a human being.
Technically, you need to generate more oxygen than you are losing. Any moonbase will recycle the air through some system of plants. Once your extraction system generates more oxygen than is lost, you are ahead of the game. You let the system run and as excess builds up you expand the base. Expanding the extraction facilities shortens the time between base expansions.
This is silly. Hemp is a nice idea, but there is a lot more to making paper and paper products than just having a source of fibers. Sometimes you use hardwoods (oaks, etc.), sometimes softwoods (pine trees, etc.), and frequently a mix of the fiber types. Why should the pulp industry care whether hemp is illegal? It's just another fiber, good for somethings, not very good for other. No one would use it to make the paper used for centerfolds. Wrong type of fiber.
"To this end, choosing the highest quality toolkit is much more important than having to pay a small fee for the development of non-GPL applications."
Either you play clean and fair or you don't. Fees are things governments like to charge, or companies with software patents, or other ilk. In this case software companies would be forced to lock into a package. Who is to say the fee won't change in the future? Companies get bought and yesterday's promises don't count for very much. This is a dreadful mistake on Novell's part and if they stay with it, I hope it costs them dearly.
The cost of a person to a company involves more than just the wage. It may involve benefits such as health insurance, but the big invisible cost (the monster squeezed into the closet) is management overhead. There are a great many laws covering employees. A competent manager always has these running as background processes that watch every word and interaction with an employee. This effort makes a constant silent burden for the manager and for the company. If you have ten employees, getting a little more work out of each costs less personnel management overhead than bringing in a new person. Then, six months later, a few more hours get added. Yes, this can start a death spiral.
Most people have no idea of the hassles involved in hiring and daily personnel management. If you hire a new person and six months later business goes down and the person gets let go, the company has expended much more effort than the person has produced. Better to have every work a little harder and maybe in another six months, if business still looks good, then consider hiring a person...
The accounting and legal overhead for each employee is too high and business cycles have become too short. When you put these together the answer is almost always to not hire unless it's absolutely unavoidable.
The situation isn't that bad. It would be if Microsoft's os were coming out with the new hardware, but it's not. There will be at least a year during which we'll have computers with the new hardware and no operating system using it. That provides a lot of time to figure out constructive solutions.
It would be more effective if people and newspapers stopped saying "RIAA sued a 12 year old girl" and instead said something like "Sony and other labels through the RIAA sued a 12 year old girl". Currently the use of the term RIAA allows the labels to keep themselves at a distance from most people's perception. The general public doesn't equate the two. The labels would hate to get bad press directly.
"I think we're a bit more cynical nowadays, and thus the future doesn't seem so exciting."
People choose to be cynical. Cynicism is not a disease and no one is forced to have it.
When I go to the bookstore, fantasy predominates on the shelves, but the quality is no better. In either case the quality for both exceeds that in the general fiction category where political correctness abounds.
On a more positive slant, the segment of society that has both writing skill and technical acumen may be busy pushing their ideas on the Internet. If you can write and want to spread you ideas, even/. will spread them to more people than a book.
Re:Sex is holding us back!
on
The Red Queen
·
· Score: 1
What you postulate would be a step backwards. Nature has tried that and found it wanting.
Slashdot Mirror
A rather neat trick: http://www.polarization.com/haidinger/haidinger.html
You are right when you say lots of natural gas would be burned. Other misconceptions abound. What follows is very abbreviated. The cheap way to make paper is to cook it using the Kraft process. The wood gets chopped into small chunks and cooked in a liquor stew which separates the lignin from the nice fibers used for paper. The lignin holds the cells together and make the wood hard so the tree grows tall. Coming out of the stew the glop gets washed off the fibers. The chemicals used to cook the wood are expensive so the glop containing the lignin (which is bound to some of the chemicals) gets burned. The burning gets rid of the lignin carbohydrates and a stream of chemicals (called smelt) which runs out the bottom of the furnace, goes into a tank of water, comes out in a stream called green liquor, and eventually ends up going back into the cooking cycle. The heat from burning the lignin goes, as slarabee describes, into turbines to make electricity and steam for various purposes. Now, if you don't burn the lignin, you have to use some other source of energy to make that steam and electricity. Second, and the point the article misses completely, how are you going to separate the lignin from the chemicals? Those boilers in paper mills are called recovery boilers because they recover the chemicals. It's the cheapest way to do it. How is going to a more expensive method for chemical recovery and going to a more expensive fuel a good solution for anything? Lignin in a liquid wood would be better than plastic. The value of the liquid wood using lignin, though, would have to be high enough to overcome the above costs.
You explain your position well. Maybe we'll converse again someday. I would enjoy it. Good luck, John
Computer software is deterministic, at least most software that people use. Computer hardware is supposed to be deterministic, but whereas software is a mental concept, hardware is an actualized "thing" manifested in reality. Whether a physical computer properly executes a program correctly is not a given, not in the same way as whether the software is logically correct. If reality were deterministic, then computer hardware would be deterministic by definition, it would part of a deterministic reality. If reality is not deterministic, then we can build good hardware and trust it to be deterministic with software. However, in this case we trust it based on knowledge and experience, we don't "know" that it is deterministic. Science is good stuff. Computers are good stuff. That is what I use all the time. It is just that science makes a few suppositions and then works on an understanding of reality. The suppositions are necessary to the definition of the framework, but the suppositions aren't guaranteed to be all-encompassing, just necessary for the framework. For example, science requires causality. No one has ever shown that causality is a strict part of the definition of reality, science assumes it and proceeds from there.
I agree that science has no problem with an extinct bear having cut a fart after having eaten an extinct moose. The requirement of evidence is also reasonable. Science works off evidence. What I said was that science sees the world through the glasses of evidence. If an aspect of reality does not follow the rules of evidence and logic, then it doesn't make it through the glasses. Science simply won't see it. This where the problem of determinism arises. If one takes the position that all of reality is strictly explainable, that reality is deterministic, then a price must be paid. There can be no responsibility in a deterministic reality, nor can there be beauty, love, or life. If instead reality were not deterministic, it does not mean that science is not a valid tool or that we should all follow voodoo mumbo-jumbo. A bat and a bear and a moth (with an elaborate sense of smell) would all have wildly different understandings of reality. All would have consistent systems that work just fine. None will ever perceive reality as the others do. A bear scientist might get a glimmering of the moth or bat's viewpoint, but a glimmering is about all it is ever going to get. Science is good stuff and we would be foolish to not use it, that doesn't mean it is the beginning and the end of everything.
If determinism means "that the result of an action can be predetermined", then how can it be that the behavior or outcome can be changed? Is there some time before an event which is a deadline? Before the deadline the event can be changed, after it the event is predetermined? Computers, as hardware, are deterministic only if reality is deterministic. Terms such as "understanding" or "communicating" or "enjoying" have no meaning in determinism. Time, itself, has no meaning oddly enough. It doesn't matter whether or not we can predict something, the concept doesn't apply to determinism. Determinism is viral. If one goes with the belief in it, then it gets into everything and nothing escapes.
Determinism is nasty stuff. One can never change anything. One cannot change behavior or outcomes. It does seem odd that we are here, enjoying life on this world, and communicating with each other, but apparently there is no reason to it at all. Even my perception, using words such as "enjoying" and "communicating", shows my lack of true understanding. Even "understanding" doesn't seem possible with determinism.
When you say "ID is useless because its principle simply contradict the way science work - it's not a model you can use to make any useful prediction at all.", you come to the crux of the problem. Science looks at reality through a type of glasses that only see things that are repeatable. If today on your way into work a bird smashed into your windshield, made a bloody mess the windshield wipers only made worse, you pulled over, and before you could fully stop the bird straightened its neck, staggered erect, and flew away, what would you think? Birds don't do this. There is still blood on your windshield. Eventually rain and car washes remove it. Did it really happen? Twenty years from now would you believed it happened or would you think you had been mistaken? Would you tell others? The glasses science uses to view reality don't see things like this. It is not as if science could not work in such a reality. If one magical thing happened to each person once a year, science could easily go about it merry way. Another thing the scientific glasses do not see is free will. In this case, though, those using the glasses refuse to live their lives based on what they see. They speak of responsibility, but if free will does not exist, then neither does responsibility. Science is wonderful stuff, just limited. Many scientists understand this, many worshipers of science do not.
What was her name?
All the carbon in trees and paper and wood products came from the atmosphere. Timber companies constantly improve the genetics of trees so that they will grow faster. Some are now harvestable in six years. People should use wood products as much as possible, and if they end up in landfills that is also good. E-books are geeky to the intelligentsia who are always big on the latest fad, whether it helps the ecology or not seems to be a matter of who shouts the loudest to them.
The trick is to not use any gas at all. Take a sphere, say 10' in diameter. Use aerogel to make the surface of the sphere. Put a thin lightweight material on the outside. Take all the air out of the sphere. You'll need enough aerogel thickness to withstand atmospheric pressure. Voila, a sphere that is lighter than air with no hydrogen or helium. These things rise. The compressive strength of aerogel would determine the diameter or the thickness of the aerogel layer. A collection of these spheres would provide lots of lift. If the arrangement suffered a slow loss of vacuum, it would be possible to restore the vacuum inside sphere and put it back into service. When I first heard about aerogel this struck me as the perfect use. The Wikipedia article on aerogel shows it supporting a brick; it should have plenty of strength. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel
Thank you for an intelligent and meaningful response. I have no personal experience with a non-American university and was always under the impression that Russia and the East European countries had first-class educational systems. I have hired a couple of people from Slovakia and in general have been impressed. They are hard-working and quite smart. A third individual was only so-so.
There are a lot of different personality types and people learn in different ways. Occasionally people will speak of an influential teacher in their lives. They describe someone who connected with them on an intimate level. It doesn't happen for everyone and very rarely does an individual speak of the five or six influential teachers in their life. So, we take an individual, run them through four years or so of education, and maybe or maybe not the student clicks with a teacher. This is efficient?
To a large extent the students don't really care about school at that point. They see little benefit in it for them and hormones are an awful distraction. Learning is important to them, though they may not realize it. Evolution has designed them to be wide open to learning new things at that age. They will learn, they can't help it, they may just end up learning trivial things like how to download their favorite songs.
In general most people don't care about intellectual development. They care far more about their social interactions. A bunch of guys sitting around drinking beer and talking after a football game can actually be a very positive thing. A bunch of intellectuals sitting around and talking rarely impresses me as much.
Sadly I do care about intellectual development, very much so. My hostile reaction to universities is largely due to seeing the pretence and not the heart that should be there. It is possible to find interesting professors, one has to do a great deal of searching. A great deal. When a person is learning something and they are smart and their mind fully engaged, their thoughts run all over the place making all sorts of strange connections. They are like a colt with wonderful genetics, bursting forth with talent, so much so they can hardly contain it. Truth be told such colts need to be handled individually, not in a herd.
Few adults I meet have mental enthusiasm. It has been lost along the way. Few of the students that I've interviewed have had that enthusiasm, it was gone and they were still in school.
No, I appreciate that you care for your students and that there are other teachers out there who do. I also believe that there must be a better way because the current way is a disaster. Almost every company out there would be better off with a time machine that would let them go back a hundred years to hire graduates from back then. There is a lot such people would have to learn in this modern day and age, but it would be worth it.
A sister and a brother of mine teach the younger grades. They do good jobs and have a passion for helping their student. My sister is working on becoming a principle to be better able to fix the problems she sees with the system. A nephew plans on becoming an English professor. He will succeed in this and I fear he will be a professor that fits well into the current system.
I suspect I would enjoy taking a class from you. Thanks again for your response.
John
ps. Group learning can be done, militaries do it and often do it very well.
"This is one of the fundamental tenets of academic life: you do your own work."
You wrote a good response, with passion. Passion is worthy of a human being. That said, academic life and the college system is possibly the greatest scam yet seen by the human race. I look back in history and don't see that the academic system has anything to do with turning people into really neat people, leaders, shining examples to others, creative, etc. What is the point of an educational system that doesn't do its very best in these areas? What can it possibly be teaching that is more important?
I didn't go to college recently, going back in the early 70's. I have interviewed students for jobs since then. In the 70's the university classes were pointless. A school that puts students in a class with a TA who can't speak English does not care at all about the students. The professor of the course doesn't, the department doesn't, the faculty as a whole don't, and we end up at the administration which is in the same boat.
Various comments use the term "cheating". That can be an ethical term, it can also be used in a legal sense. In the first sense what complaint do universities have? They aren't interested in ethics or instilling ethics in their students. The institutions don't demonstrate ethical behavior themselves. Two easy examples, college football and the charming tendency for professors who are good teachers to be lower on the pecking order than hot-shot reeearchers with lots of publications. So the schools can't complain about the ethical aspect of cheating, ethics aren't part of their universe. They don't teach it, don't practice it, and organizations that do concentrate in the area, such as religions with strict moral codes, receive scorn and hostility.
That leaves us with the legal definition of cheating. Again, respect for law is not something that has been taught for years in higher education. Quite the contrary. Why should a university that teaches its students that law has only the authority given it by the individual be surprised when students chose to not follow academic rules?
I said I went to school in the 70's. The students I have interviewed since then seemed to have learned little. The ones with good grades are very good at scamming the system. The ones that don't cheat have often refined the talent of being able to pass tests. Two weeks later they have forgotten the vast majority of what was on the test. Six months later just about everything else is gone.
The scandal is in the waste of good years in people's lives. For the amount of money wasted on people going through the motions, it would be better to pay companies to teach the students on the job or in company run classes. Give the companies a tax credit. Some companies wouldn't do the students much good, but word would get around. Besides, would the students be worse off? The only thing they are getting now is a piece of paper; as I said earlier, one of the all-time great scams.
Big Brother lives by the same rules as the rest of the world. The most important of these is that manpower is expensive. This means that if people, on an individual basis, take extra time (only a minute or two) to fufill requests for information or call and ask some questions of a live person, then modern management will go nuts. Companies and organizations concentrate hard on reducing headcount and making things work more efficiently. Managers up and down the line are evaluated by these measurements. Bottom line employees are too. If you are in a grocery store and the checkout person wants some personal identification for some peaches or anything else, take an extra minute or two to give them the information. It's not hard, just ask a couple of questions about why they want it and make sure the explanation is clear.
This type of behavior causes lines to grow a little bit and things to run a little slower. Computers will notice this sort of thing and flag it. Does it mean the store has a lackadaisical manager who isn't hiring good people or is letting them slack off? The same applies to government organizations.
Much data is collected automatically. There is not much that can be done about that. However, the government has a different, but similar weakness. If you find the government is collecting some piece of information and you wish they would stop, call your representative or senator. Don't complain, just ask for an explanation about why it is needed. Insist on a good explanation. Elected officials have staffs and they cost money. As in most things some staffers are better than others. If voters start chewing up more staffer time the elected one will become unhappy. Hiring more staffers reduces quality which tends to give callers more bad experiences which leads to bad publicity.
Big Brother's weakness is that of every other organization, the bottom line, whether it be money or influence or elected position. Every organization stares at its bottom line for lack of a navel. It takes very little change to catch their notice.
Tristfardd
People learn a sytem that works and develop a vested interest in it. Humans are much more emotional than rational, even scientists. If someone challenges that system because it seems "ugly" they get jumped on good. Whether a system works or "is correct" depends on perception. DDT works; Ptolemaic astronomy worked very well for a long time; blind cave fish have an understanding of reality that is complete, consistent, and works.
Many people don't think much of modern physics, it comes across as "ugly". Acolytes might refer to its beauty. Just because something seems to work is not a reason to like it or to not attack it at every possibility. After all, the pursuit of beauty is a worthwhile goal for a human being.
Technically, you need to generate more oxygen than you are losing. Any moonbase will recycle the air through some system of plants. Once your extraction system generates more oxygen than is lost, you are ahead of the game. You let the system run and as excess builds up you expand the base. Expanding the extraction facilities shortens the time between base expansions.
This is silly. Hemp is a nice idea, but there is a lot more to making paper and paper products than just having a source of fibers. Sometimes you use hardwoods (oaks, etc.), sometimes softwoods (pine trees, etc.), and frequently a mix of the fiber types. Why should the pulp industry care whether hemp is illegal? It's just another fiber, good for somethings, not very good for other. No one would use it to make the paper used for centerfolds. Wrong type of fiber.
"To this end, choosing the highest quality toolkit is much more important than having to pay a small fee for the development of non-GPL applications."
Either you play clean and fair or you don't. Fees are things governments like to charge, or companies with software patents, or other ilk. In this case software companies would be forced to lock into a package. Who is to say the fee won't change in the future? Companies get bought and yesterday's promises don't count for very much. This is a dreadful mistake on Novell's part and if they stay with it, I hope it costs them dearly.
The cost of a person to a company involves more than just the wage. It may involve benefits such as health insurance, but the big invisible cost (the monster squeezed into the closet) is management overhead. There are a great many laws covering employees. A competent manager always has these running as background processes that watch every word and interaction with an employee. This effort makes a constant silent burden for the manager and for the company. If you have ten employees, getting a little more work out of each costs less personnel management overhead than bringing in a new person. Then, six months later, a few more hours get added. Yes, this can start a death spiral. Most people have no idea of the hassles involved in hiring and daily personnel management. If you hire a new person and six months later business goes down and the person gets let go, the company has expended much more effort than the person has produced. Better to have every work a little harder and maybe in another six months, if business still looks good, then consider hiring a person... The accounting and legal overhead for each employee is too high and business cycles have become too short. When you put these together the answer is almost always to not hire unless it's absolutely unavoidable.
The Princess Bride
The situation isn't that bad. It would be if Microsoft's os were coming out with the new hardware, but it's not. There will be at least a year during which we'll have computers with the new hardware and no operating system using it. That provides a lot of time to figure out constructive solutions.
It would be more effective if people and newspapers stopped saying "RIAA sued a 12 year old girl" and instead said something like "Sony and other labels through the RIAA sued a 12 year old girl". Currently the use of the term RIAA allows the labels to keep themselves at a distance from most people's perception. The general public doesn't equate the two. The labels would hate to get bad press directly.
"I think we're a bit more cynical nowadays, and thus the future doesn't seem so exciting." People choose to be cynical. Cynicism is not a disease and no one is forced to have it. When I go to the bookstore, fantasy predominates on the shelves, but the quality is no better. In either case the quality for both exceeds that in the general fiction category where political correctness abounds. On a more positive slant, the segment of society that has both writing skill and technical acumen may be busy pushing their ideas on the Internet. If you can write and want to spread you ideas, even /. will spread them to more people than a book.
What you postulate would be a step backwards. Nature has tried that and found it wanting.