IN THIS CONTEXT, being called gay WAS a "charge." Why in the world do you think Maher did it?
If some random irresponsible Republican goes on a live show and says that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian and she's hiding that fact to keep from showing that she is simply advancing a gay/lesbian agenda, it would be horribly irresponsible to air it even the first time (much less a second time). This is the same way. This has nothing to do with ideology on either left or right. It's about responsible journalism, which seems to be beyond your comprehension.
If you don't understand this -- in the context of modern society and politics -- nobody's going to be able to explain it to you. Watch the edited portion and you'll know exactly why it's an issue. Maher was the one using it for political advantage (trying to paint Mehlman as hypocritical). If the charge is true, it would be newsworthy, but WE HAVE NO IDEA WHETHER IT'S TRUE. That is the point. We don't know the truth and neither did CNN, so it was irresponsible to air it.
That is a terribly naive statement. If a journalist just presented whatever interview subjects told them -- without regard to what's fair or accurate -- they would be terribly irresponsible. When I was a journalist, I was routinely told things about people I covered. Almost all of what I heard was unfair and inaccurate rumor. A responsible journalist tries to make sure what he is putting out there is factual. Otherwise, there is even less credibility than there already is (for the news media).
You seem to be missing the point. It's not about CNN not getting sued. It's about being RESPONSIBLE with an explosive charge when CNN doesn't know the facts.
If random Person A goes on a live show and makes a COMPLETELY UNSOURCED accusation that Person B is gay, it would be completely unethical and irresponsible for CNN to leave it in a subsequent broadcast of the show. I used to be a journalist, and I guarantee that most reasonable (non-ideological) journalists would make the same decision. It's not censorship. It's a responsible editorial decision regarding an completely unsubstantiated charge. The guy may or may not be gay. I haven't a clue (and don't care), but you don't broadcast something like that without having some reasonable basis for believing it's TRUE.
You might not have noticed, but he's the head of a political party that just lost a huge election. It's natural that he'd be resigning because of the defeat. The absurd notion that he's resigning because of this random (and wholly unsubstantiated) comment on CNN is totally stupid. You're jumping to conclusions that aren't necessarily warranted.
First, anybody who is "always hearing about huge LAN parties and tournaments" is NOT in the mainstream of average Americans, so what you hear about has little relevance to drawing conclusions about the market. It's just geeks and hard-core gamers who even know that such things as LAN parties exist.
Second, the hard-core gamers who are willing to spend huge amounts of money on a high-end PC are the very people who are obsessive enough to be frequent participants in such events. More casuals gamers (which includes the vast majority of those who play computer games of any kind) aren't going to spend that kind of money OR attend such events.
David
A profitable niche, nothing more
on
HP Acquires VoodooPC
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For most people, a "gaming maching" is a PlayStation of XBox, not a high-end PC. There is a relatively small sub-set of gamers who are willing to shell out large amounts of money for high end PCs optimized for gaming, but those machines are non-existant to the vast majority of computer users (and computer buyers). There just aren't that many people who care enough about gaming to spend that kind of money on it. The niche is profitable, but not huge compared to the overall PC market.
That won't happen, at least not for the forseeable future. Local retailers understand local needs better in different cultures. Wal-Mart has been highly unsuccessful so far in other countries. It's possible that the company can learn enough to compete effectively everywhere, but it seems highly unlikely. What people seldem realize is that EVERY successful company (even the ones considered unbeatable at one time) eventually fall to other competitors -- unless governments prop them up through protectionism.
If good people in other countries can do certain things better than Americans, they ought to get the work. It's up to us to compete with them (and each other) instead of whining about the competition. Globalization is helping everyone in the long run. Competition can always be painted as nasty and brutish, but it's the way we get progress. Everyone benefits from it, even if it causes job changes in the short run.
When the Japanese auto manufacturers started sending their vehicles to the United States, nobody took them seriously at first. Then American consumers realized that the Japanese were making better cars, so they started buying them in increasing numbers. The U.S. carmakers (and their unions) simply whined about the competition instead of DOING enough about it. If they had actually competed by producing products that were better than the Japanese products (in reliability, styling and a whole range of issues), they could have fought off the competition. Instead, the unions demanded that they keep their arcane work rules that saved useless jobs in the short run, but which lost a LOT more jobs in the long run. The managements remained in denial that they were that much worse than the Japanese. Even when they DID start improving, it was too little, too late. The culture in Detroit couldn't compete with the rate of change (and improvement) given to us by Honda and Toyota. American consumers benefitted from this competition. The stockholders and employees of the U.S. companies COULD have benefitted, too, but they were both too shortsighted to learn and compete.
U.S. IT is in the position that the U.S. auto industry about 30 years ago. It leads the world, so it doesn't see the need to innovate as much as it did even 10 or 20 years ago. They're arrogant and fat and happy, it seems. Now the rest of the world is starting to catch up to us. Foreigners are learning to do the same things we've been doing, but less expensively. So what's the response? The companies and the employees whine about competition. If you can't see the continued pattern (and what to do about it), you're going to have no one to blame but yourselves.
Apple has no control over what other people say, including these security "experts." Or are you claiming that Apple has some sort of mysterious mind control it will keep to prevent release of the info?;-)
I just don't answer calls from numbers I don't recognize. I got rid of my home phone several years ago and just use a cell phone. If I don't know a number, that's what voice mail is for. The people who know me know that I'll return a call when I have the time, so they leave messages if they need me.
So I'm not on the "do not call list." Instead, everybody else is on my "do not answer list.":-)
I would argue that Lincoln was our worst president for the reasons you allude to, but I think he tended to just take power unilaterally without trying to justify it with the Commerce Clause. While Lincoln tried to arrest a Supreme Court justice (the chief justice, maybe?) for trying to strike down some of his more egregiously illegal acts, FDR had legal theorists to dress it up in nice language based on the Commerce Clause. The effect was the same, but the reasoning was different, to the best of my recollection. (On the issue of slavery that you mention in passing, it amazes me that people don't realize that Lincoln ONLY freed slaves in the Confederate states, not in the Union states where slavery was allowed. To him, it was merely a tool to use in pursuing more centralized power.)
So I don't think we disagree about the basic issue. I just don't believe anybody before FDR's era used the Commerce Clause to justify what they wanted to do. I could be mistaken, of course. I don't have a book handy that deals with the issue and I'm too lazy to Google it.:-)
If I had something that dumb to say, I'd post as an AC, too.
Since you're (apparently) claiming that such rights exist, it's incumbent on you to show where or why they exist. It's not up to me to prove the negative. On what basis would you make the claim that such rights exist? Natural law? Constitutional law? Where else? Or are you just pulling it out of the air because it sounds nice?
Ah, yes. The "commerce clause." The clause that magically allows the federal government to ignore all of the other restrictions placed on it by the Constitution.
And, no, the alleged rights you mentioned don't exist, either. They're figments of the socialist imagination made possible by lying about what the U.S. Constitution actually says and clearly intends. When people such as FDR and his friends wanted to change the rules by which the republic was governed, they didn't bother with little things such as legality -- and we're still dealing with the ever-increasing consequences.
If a company wants to cater to the disabled (or the brown-eyed or Asians or left-handed Latinos), it should be able to make that decision for itself. But nobody has a RIGHT to do business with any particular company. What's next? Do deaf people sue every company that has a telephone and doesn't offer TTD service?
The ADA sounds good if you don't think it through logically, as do most of the stupid new laws that governments pass which encroach on the rights of individuals. When people claim a new right today, all they do is appeal to our emotions and good will. They don't bother to explain why anyone has a "right" to force me (as a business owner) to modify my business to suit THEIR needs and wants. No such right exists, but nobody has told the federal government that.
Your reasons why students might want to attend class might be perfectly valid, but they have NOTHING to do with whether the podcasts should be posted immediately without regard for whether anyone shows up or not. I don't think class attendance should affect a grade in the least. If a student can pass whatever tests are given (written, oral, projects, whatever), he ought to pass. Giving credit for "class participation" is a way to artificially help students who test poorly and is always subjective.
With that said, I think students generally learn much more by showing up in class. But that ought to be the student's decision. If he thinks he's a hotshot who doesn't need to attend class, let him try. If he fails, he has nobody to blame but himself. And in some classes that I had (the ones with nothing but straight lecture), attending class would have been a waste of time if I'd had audio of the lecture available.
I think podcasts ought to be posted as soon as the material is available. Let the students use it (or not use it) as they see fit. They'll soon figure out what works for them.
By that reasoning, we all ought to stick to old CGA monitors. Who cares about higher resolution or more colors? Who really NEEDS stuff like that? The old standards were good enough to tell roughly what something was. Right?
People want things that look better and clearer. Few people NEED high-resolution monitors or digital cameras or even printers. (Isn't 300dpi good enough for anyone? Or even dot matrix, for that matter?) No, we enjoy being able to hear things more clearly and see pictures more clearly. If you're stuck with the "small, choppy image" that you suggest, why bother with the video at all?
So what? What's the big deal if someone was paid to produce this? That's just a normal part of politics. I'm a libertarian, so I'm not crazy about Gore OR his GOP opponents, but both of the major parties have partisans who create such material. Leftist organizations such as MoveOn.org try to get people to create buzz about web sites or videos that push their point of view. What's so surprising (or wrong) about some right-wing organization or person doing the same? It's just another attempt to get an opposing point of view into public consciousness. The fact that it was done anonymously on YouTube makes is smarter.
With that said, I think it's very poorly done. I'm not talking about the amateurish production values, but rather the weak (and unfunny) content. I'm a skeptic on global warming, but the piece just isn't effective in lampooning Gore.
It's a logical fallacy to assert that the government where I live has to be perfect for me to point out a problem that is going to be a serious potential issue for this project. (I don't like ANY government. I think they're all lousy. Some are just worse than others about overt corruption on such big projects.)
Just because the planners for this project SAY it requires no infrastructure to make it work other than what's available doesn't make it true. Just shoving a piece of hardware at someone isn't going to magically make him learn something. The goal of this project is allegedly to bring the people on the bottom up to par technologically with people in more developed countries. All it will really do is create bigger gaps between the small minority in those countries who are already educated and the majority who don't have the basics.
Better education comes from the interaction of a decent teacher with a student, not from throwing a piece of hardware at them. We haven't even figured out how to make computers improve education in places where we have all the money in the world to throw at education. What evidence is there to think it's going to work some kind of magic in other places that have even less developed education systems? It's all pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. It's the evidence of an irrational trust in technology to fix problems -- when the problem isn't the technology. (Hint: The educated people of the past -- before computers were even thought of -- were somehow able to become educated despite the lack of comptuers.) The problems limited these Third World countries are economic and government-imposed. Although I don't agree with this author's economic conclusions about everything, he does make a strong case for why Third World governments are causing the poverty their own people face:
People who think "it is worth a shot" haven't thought this thing through, IMO. Governments are going to divert millions upon millions of dollars to a project that is more likely to produce a bunch of expensive doorstops, IMO. The ones that ARE used will most likely be used by people who would have had computers anyway. The ones who it's allegedly supposed to help aren't going to see any benefit to it.
You and others who lash out at those who think this is a bad idea seem to see this as having something to do with evil racist attitudes of people who don't like "other people," but that misses the point entirely. To me, it's merely that computers don't fix education the way people assume they do -- not here in the West or in any place. If you want to be dumb enough and insulting enough to think my opinion is wrong because I live in Alabama, you're terribly prejudiced. My opinion is based on my judgment concerning the efficacy of computers in learning, not judgment about the people targeted. But you'd apparently rather make prejudiced assumptions instead of understand the reasons behind why I think it will fail.
As I said in another reply, that phrase was intended as hyperbole. The sentence you're quoting was where I was lampooning the attitude of the typical person who doesn't care about anything except that it runs Linux.
You're an idiot. I wouldn't normally be so blunt, but your stupidity, rudeness and prejudice justify it in this case.
Good intentions don't necessarily mean results. And you're truly a moron if you believe that my judgment that this project won't help people means that I am a racist. For your information, I've been on trips to a couple of places with "brown people" to actually work for improvement in their lives. But you're dumb enough to think that it's racism if I think a project doesn't make rational sense.
The funny thing is that YOU are the prejudiced one in this case who makes assumptions which aren't justified by the reality of the what I said.
Even if we assume that the corruption which normally gets in the way of everything in countries such as this will not be a factor this time, I don't think these computers will make a bit of difference in these countries. Computers require both infrastructure and previous basic education to make them worth anything. Just handing a computer to somebody who doesn't have the background to understand the tool's context isn't going to make any difference. Some people seem to think that computers somehow make people smarter and better-educated all of a sudden, but real education can happen far cheaper with much more basic and traditional tools. I love technology and I'm all in favor of progress, but I see zero evidence that computers in U.S. classrooms are making education better. I see even less likelihood of it making education better in Nigeria.
Of course, as I said, I'm in the minority with this opinion. Since it runs Linux, most geeks think it's cool enough for them to want one, so it MUST be good for impoverished kids in mud huts.
David
Your response is too stupid to leave unanswered. You don't seem to understand the difference between stupid artistic decisions by a director on the one hand and bad technical work on the other. Technical work in movies IS the best its ever been. Of course, you probably don't understand that technical work means anything other than "special effects," when it really means photography, sound, editing and tons more. You're missing the whole freakin' point. Technical work can be perfect, but if artistic decisions by the director are bad, the best technical work in the world doesn't matter. The reason that movies use stupid effects such as the ones from, "The Matrix," so much have nothing to do with the people in charge of the technical end of the business. It's because directors (and sometimes producers) make stupid decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
IN THIS CONTEXT, being called gay WAS a "charge." Why in the world do you think Maher did it?
If some random irresponsible Republican goes on a live show and says that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian and she's hiding that fact to keep from showing that she is simply advancing a gay/lesbian agenda, it would be horribly irresponsible to air it even the first time (much less a second time). This is the same way. This has nothing to do with ideology on either left or right. It's about responsible journalism, which seems to be beyond your comprehension.
David
If you don't understand this -- in the context of modern society and politics -- nobody's going to be able to explain it to you. Watch the edited portion and you'll know exactly why it's an issue. Maher was the one using it for political advantage (trying to paint Mehlman as hypocritical). If the charge is true, it would be newsworthy, but WE HAVE NO IDEA WHETHER IT'S TRUE. That is the point. We don't know the truth and neither did CNN, so it was irresponsible to air it.
David
That is a terribly naive statement. If a journalist just presented whatever interview subjects told them -- without regard to what's fair or accurate -- they would be terribly irresponsible. When I was a journalist, I was routinely told things about people I covered. Almost all of what I heard was unfair and inaccurate rumor. A responsible journalist tries to make sure what he is putting out there is factual. Otherwise, there is even less credibility than there already is (for the news media).
David
You seem to be missing the point. It's not about CNN not getting sued. It's about being RESPONSIBLE with an explosive charge when CNN doesn't know the facts.
David
If random Person A goes on a live show and makes a COMPLETELY UNSOURCED accusation that Person B is gay, it would be completely unethical and irresponsible for CNN to leave it in a subsequent broadcast of the show. I used to be a journalist, and I guarantee that most reasonable (non-ideological) journalists would make the same decision. It's not censorship. It's a responsible editorial decision regarding an completely unsubstantiated charge. The guy may or may not be gay. I haven't a clue (and don't care), but you don't broadcast something like that without having some reasonable basis for believing it's TRUE.
David
You might not have noticed, but he's the head of a political party that just lost a huge election. It's natural that he'd be resigning because of the defeat. The absurd notion that he's resigning because of this random (and wholly unsubstantiated) comment on CNN is totally stupid. You're jumping to conclusions that aren't necessarily warranted.
David
First, anybody who is "always hearing about huge LAN parties and tournaments" is NOT in the mainstream of average Americans, so what you hear about has little relevance to drawing conclusions about the market. It's just geeks and hard-core gamers who even know that such things as LAN parties exist.
Second, the hard-core gamers who are willing to spend huge amounts of money on a high-end PC are the very people who are obsessive enough to be frequent participants in such events. More casuals gamers (which includes the vast majority of those who play computer games of any kind) aren't going to spend that kind of money OR attend such events.
David
For most people, a "gaming maching" is a PlayStation of XBox, not a high-end PC. There is a relatively small sub-set of gamers who are willing to shell out large amounts of money for high end PCs optimized for gaming, but those machines are non-existant to the vast majority of computer users (and computer buyers). There just aren't that many people who care enough about gaming to spend that kind of money on it. The niche is profitable, but not huge compared to the overall PC market.
David
That won't happen, at least not for the forseeable future. Local retailers understand local needs better in different cultures. Wal-Mart has been highly unsuccessful so far in other countries. It's possible that the company can learn enough to compete effectively everywhere, but it seems highly unlikely. What people seldem realize is that EVERY successful company (even the ones considered unbeatable at one time) eventually fall to other competitors -- unless governments prop them up through protectionism.
David
If good people in other countries can do certain things better than Americans, they ought to get the work. It's up to us to compete with them (and each other) instead of whining about the competition. Globalization is helping everyone in the long run. Competition can always be painted as nasty and brutish, but it's the way we get progress. Everyone benefits from it, even if it causes job changes in the short run.
When the Japanese auto manufacturers started sending their vehicles to the United States, nobody took them seriously at first. Then American consumers realized that the Japanese were making better cars, so they started buying them in increasing numbers. The U.S. carmakers (and their unions) simply whined about the competition instead of DOING enough about it. If they had actually competed by producing products that were better than the Japanese products (in reliability, styling and a whole range of issues), they could have fought off the competition. Instead, the unions demanded that they keep their arcane work rules that saved useless jobs in the short run, but which lost a LOT more jobs in the long run. The managements remained in denial that they were that much worse than the Japanese. Even when they DID start improving, it was too little, too late. The culture in Detroit couldn't compete with the rate of change (and improvement) given to us by Honda and Toyota. American consumers benefitted from this competition. The stockholders and employees of the U.S. companies COULD have benefitted, too, but they were both too shortsighted to learn and compete.
U.S. IT is in the position that the U.S. auto industry about 30 years ago. It leads the world, so it doesn't see the need to innovate as much as it did even 10 or 20 years ago. They're arrogant and fat and happy, it seems. Now the rest of the world is starting to catch up to us. Foreigners are learning to do the same things we've been doing, but less expensively. So what's the response? The companies and the employees whine about competition. If you can't see the continued pattern (and what to do about it), you're going to have no one to blame but yourselves.
David
Apple has no control over what other people say, including these security "experts." Or are you claiming that Apple has some sort of mysterious mind control it will keep to prevent release of the info? ;-)
David
I just don't answer calls from numbers I don't recognize. I got rid of my home phone several years ago and just use a cell phone. If I don't know a number, that's what voice mail is for. The people who know me know that I'll return a call when I have the time, so they leave messages if they need me.
:-)
So I'm not on the "do not call list." Instead, everybody else is on my "do not answer list."
David
I would argue that Lincoln was our worst president for the reasons you allude to, but I think he tended to just take power unilaterally without trying to justify it with the Commerce Clause. While Lincoln tried to arrest a Supreme Court justice (the chief justice, maybe?) for trying to strike down some of his more egregiously illegal acts, FDR had legal theorists to dress it up in nice language based on the Commerce Clause. The effect was the same, but the reasoning was different, to the best of my recollection. (On the issue of slavery that you mention in passing, it amazes me that people don't realize that Lincoln ONLY freed slaves in the Confederate states, not in the Union states where slavery was allowed. To him, it was merely a tool to use in pursuing more centralized power.)
:-)
So I don't think we disagree about the basic issue. I just don't believe anybody before FDR's era used the Commerce Clause to justify what they wanted to do. I could be mistaken, of course. I don't have a book handy that deals with the issue and I'm too lazy to Google it.
David
If I had something that dumb to say, I'd post as an AC, too.
Since you're (apparently) claiming that such rights exist, it's incumbent on you to show where or why they exist. It's not up to me to prove the negative. On what basis would you make the claim that such rights exist? Natural law? Constitutional law? Where else? Or are you just pulling it out of the air because it sounds nice?
David
Ah, yes. The "commerce clause." The clause that magically allows the federal government to ignore all of the other restrictions placed on it by the Constitution.
And, no, the alleged rights you mentioned don't exist, either. They're figments of the socialist imagination made possible by lying about what the U.S. Constitution actually says and clearly intends. When people such as FDR and his friends wanted to change the rules by which the republic was governed, they didn't bother with little things such as legality -- and we're still dealing with the ever-increasing consequences.
David
If a company wants to cater to the disabled (or the brown-eyed or Asians or left-handed Latinos), it should be able to make that decision for itself. But nobody has a RIGHT to do business with any particular company. What's next? Do deaf people sue every company that has a telephone and doesn't offer TTD service?
The ADA sounds good if you don't think it through logically, as do most of the stupid new laws that governments pass which encroach on the rights of individuals. When people claim a new right today, all they do is appeal to our emotions and good will. They don't bother to explain why anyone has a "right" to force me (as a business owner) to modify my business to suit THEIR needs and wants. No such right exists, but nobody has told the federal government that.
David
Your reasons why students might want to attend class might be perfectly valid, but they have NOTHING to do with whether the podcasts should be posted immediately without regard for whether anyone shows up or not. I don't think class attendance should affect a grade in the least. If a student can pass whatever tests are given (written, oral, projects, whatever), he ought to pass. Giving credit for "class participation" is a way to artificially help students who test poorly and is always subjective.
With that said, I think students generally learn much more by showing up in class. But that ought to be the student's decision. If he thinks he's a hotshot who doesn't need to attend class, let him try. If he fails, he has nobody to blame but himself. And in some classes that I had (the ones with nothing but straight lecture), attending class would have been a waste of time if I'd had audio of the lecture available.
I think podcasts ought to be posted as soon as the material is available. Let the students use it (or not use it) as they see fit. They'll soon figure out what works for them.
David
By that reasoning, we all ought to stick to old CGA monitors. Who cares about higher resolution or more colors? Who really NEEDS stuff like that? The old standards were good enough to tell roughly what something was. Right?
People want things that look better and clearer. Few people NEED high-resolution monitors or digital cameras or even printers. (Isn't 300dpi good enough for anyone? Or even dot matrix, for that matter?) No, we enjoy being able to hear things more clearly and see pictures more clearly. If you're stuck with the "small, choppy image" that you suggest, why bother with the video at all?
David
So what? What's the big deal if someone was paid to produce this? That's just a normal part of politics. I'm a libertarian, so I'm not crazy about Gore OR his GOP opponents, but both of the major parties have partisans who create such material. Leftist organizations such as MoveOn.org try to get people to create buzz about web sites or videos that push their point of view. What's so surprising (or wrong) about some right-wing organization or person doing the same? It's just another attempt to get an opposing point of view into public consciousness. The fact that it was done anonymously on YouTube makes is smarter.
With that said, I think it's very poorly done. I'm not talking about the amateurish production values, but rather the weak (and unfunny) content. I'm a skeptic on global warming, but the piece just isn't effective in lampooning Gore.
David
It's a logical fallacy to assert that the government where I live has to be perfect for me to point out a problem that is going to be a serious potential issue for this project. (I don't like ANY government. I think they're all lousy. Some are just worse than others about overt corruption on such big projects.)
5 189779?v=glance
Just because the planners for this project SAY it requires no infrastructure to make it work other than what's available doesn't make it true. Just shoving a piece of hardware at someone isn't going to magically make him learn something. The goal of this project is allegedly to bring the people on the bottom up to par technologically with people in more developed countries. All it will really do is create bigger gaps between the small minority in those countries who are already educated and the majority who don't have the basics.
Better education comes from the interaction of a decent teacher with a student, not from throwing a piece of hardware at them. We haven't even figured out how to make computers improve education in places where we have all the money in the world to throw at education. What evidence is there to think it's going to work some kind of magic in other places that have even less developed education systems? It's all pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. It's the evidence of an irrational trust in technology to fix problems -- when the problem isn't the technology. (Hint: The educated people of the past -- before computers were even thought of -- were somehow able to become educated despite the lack of comptuers.) The problems limited these Third World countries are economic and government-imposed. Although I don't agree with this author's economic conclusions about everything, he does make a strong case for why Third World governments are causing the poverty their own people face:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/019
People who think "it is worth a shot" haven't thought this thing through, IMO. Governments are going to divert millions upon millions of dollars to a project that is more likely to produce a bunch of expensive doorstops, IMO. The ones that ARE used will most likely be used by people who would have had computers anyway. The ones who it's allegedly supposed to help aren't going to see any benefit to it.
You and others who lash out at those who think this is a bad idea seem to see this as having something to do with evil racist attitudes of people who don't like "other people," but that misses the point entirely. To me, it's merely that computers don't fix education the way people assume they do -- not here in the West or in any place. If you want to be dumb enough and insulting enough to think my opinion is wrong because I live in Alabama, you're terribly prejudiced. My opinion is based on my judgment concerning the efficacy of computers in learning, not judgment about the people targeted. But you'd apparently rather make prejudiced assumptions instead of understand the reasons behind why I think it will fail.
David
As I said in another reply, that phrase was intended as hyperbole. The sentence you're quoting was where I was lampooning the attitude of the typical person who doesn't care about anything except that it runs Linux.
David
That phrase was intended as hyperbole. I'm sorry if it wasn't obvious enough.
David
You're an idiot. I wouldn't normally be so blunt, but your stupidity, rudeness and prejudice justify it in this case.
Good intentions don't necessarily mean results. And you're truly a moron if you believe that my judgment that this project won't help people means that I am a racist. For your information, I've been on trips to a couple of places with "brown people" to actually work for improvement in their lives. But you're dumb enough to think that it's racism if I think a project doesn't make rational sense.
The funny thing is that YOU are the prejudiced one in this case who makes assumptions which aren't justified by the reality of the what I said.
David
Even if we assume that the corruption which normally gets in the way of everything in countries such as this will not be a factor this time, I don't think these computers will make a bit of difference in these countries. Computers require both infrastructure and previous basic education to make them worth anything. Just handing a computer to somebody who doesn't have the background to understand the tool's context isn't going to make any difference. Some people seem to think that computers somehow make people smarter and better-educated all of a sudden, but real education can happen far cheaper with much more basic and traditional tools. I love technology and I'm all in favor of progress, but I see zero evidence that computers in U.S. classrooms are making education better. I see even less likelihood of it making education better in Nigeria. Of course, as I said, I'm in the minority with this opinion. Since it runs Linux, most geeks think it's cool enough for them to want one, so it MUST be good for impoverished kids in mud huts. David
Your response is too stupid to leave unanswered. You don't seem to understand the difference between stupid artistic decisions by a director on the one hand and bad technical work on the other. Technical work in movies IS the best its ever been. Of course, you probably don't understand that technical work means anything other than "special effects," when it really means photography, sound, editing and tons more. You're missing the whole freakin' point. Technical work can be perfect, but if artistic decisions by the director are bad, the best technical work in the world doesn't matter. The reason that movies use stupid effects such as the ones from, "The Matrix," so much have nothing to do with the people in charge of the technical end of the business. It's because directors (and sometimes producers) make stupid decisions.
David