That's exactly the thing that I was wondering about while reading all the "whoa, it held true for so long so it must be a law" or "whoa, he must have carefully plotted a curve through a large sample of data. Engineers who understand statistics don't grow on trees." bullshit posts. Was starting to lose faith in humanity already.
I mean, gee, it's like me postulating "Moraelin upgrades his computer at least once a year" as "Moraelin's Law". Self-fulfilling prophecy, here we come.
Yeah, I know that a concept of "rights" is becoming a pretty strange notion in the USA nowadays. Or that thinking for oneself is a baaad thing.
But basically all you're saying there is that France does still treat people as humans, not like a bunch of terrorists until proven innocent. E.g., yes, there was a demonstration. It may be surprising to you, but demonstrations _are_ a legal thing in a democracy.
Was _everyone_ in the demonstration an illegal immigrant? No, seriously? How do you know that there aren't also a bunch of french citizens in there?
(Believe it or not every single country has the current USA-style "immigrant = terrorist" scare, or even the same kind of nationalism. The french kind of nationalism for example is more about language and culture, than about being born there. So there could have been quite a bunch of people born in france who are sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to people whose only fault is not being born there.)
So what do you propose that the police should do? Arrest everyone and keep them in custody several days until they can check them all? Break a legal protest on the excuse that some people in that protest might be illegal immigrants?
Yeah, that excuse will soo come in handy next time when people protest something. Give that idea to Bush while you're at it: I'm sure he'll love doing that to the next anti-war demonstration. Hey, there _could_ be illegal Mexican immigrants or some wanted terrorists in that demonstration. Must make sure.
If you really believe that burying democracy alive is the right way to gain some vague promise of safety, you're so mistaken it's not even funny.
Or how about the common sense of being tactful there? You propose, what? That the police clashes with an already agitated group of demonstrators, to show them who's boss? Yeah, way to go to turn a peaceful demonstration into a riot.
So you're telling me, what? That unlike you, someone in the French police actually had a brain?
Briefly: put down the crack pipe, join a 12 step program, or see a competent surgeon about having your head removed from your ass.
Just wanted to give the heads-up that firewrought got that right. I wasn't talking about being able to count to 20,000 or to 1,000,000, I was talking about people's perception of it. The gut feeling, so to speak.
Or to put it otherwise, I wasn't talking about a limit where people become ignorant or anything, but a limit where it all becomes... abstract. Just a number. It's something you can't really use any kind of intuition about. Not because of being ignorant, but simply because you've never experienced or perceived with your senses anything even vaguely similar in scale.
Like, that you can imagine 10 people in your mind, but 1,000,000 people becomes just a number. That 10 ft is a distance you can imagine in your head. You can tell "ok, 3 ft is about from there to there." But 1 light year is just some abstract concept.
Sure, you can do maths with it, because you're a smart and educated person. You can maybe even convert it in hex in your head if you're alpha-geek, or to metres, parsecs and ft.
But all I'm saying is that you're past the limit of your intuition. It _only_ exists as an abstract number at that point. Your intuition doesn't place "1 billion years into the future" much farther than it places "next century". That's what I'm saying.
Of course, this just begs a question like "wth do I need my intuition for? I can work with it abstractly very well, thank you very much." Well, for solving a physics problem, you don't need any intuition, of course. To understand why someone would get worked up about something that's likely 1 billion years in the future, well, I think intuition makes a nice hypothesis:P
That is a very insightful observation, except for the fact that most people and countries don't give a damn about internet gambling. It's not like it actively goes spreading gambling-zombie viruses or actively goes forcing people to gamble, or anything.
So IMHO it doesn't even invalidate my point.
1. We're still talking about a simple offshoring operation. We're not really talking about having to _move_ there, because your country would throw you in prison for that operation.
I'm willing to bet that the people making money from those gambling operation still live comfortably in the USA or EU. If they actually faced a choice like "(A) personally move to a third world country, (B) shut down the operation, or (C) go to jail" I still believe that most would choose B.
But either way, it doesn't really either contradict or prove my point. It's just not the same situation.
2. Because noone is actively fighting Internet gambling, a country hosting those isn't in any danger of being disconnected from the 'net for that. I.e., it doesn't prove that point either.
Now let's think we were talking spam there. That all the world's spam was coming from a single third world nation, let's call it Elbonia. I'm thinking you can already see where this is going: everyone's spam filters and most ISP's would completely block emails from that block.
I.e., as I've described before, that country would find itself quickly off the net, and its spammers effectively disconnected from their source of income. Sure, the country may still encourage them. But suddenly they can't actually make money as long as they stay in that country. Are you that sure they wouldn't drop it like a hot potato?
3. As illustrated above, it doesn't even take any political effort to take a few bad apples off the net. Any third world country that becomes _the_ source of spam will just make every ISP's and admin's day: it's a single rule to block the trash. Incidentally, the rule that also takes that country off the net.
It's much the same as from half the world you can't make a credit card purchase any more. There was no political decree to start blocking those countries' citizens from online purchases. It's the banks themselves who eventually just had enough of those countries' encouraging fraud.
So what's China going to do there? Call my ISP and threaten with sanctions if they don't start allowing spam from China? Threaten my ISP with WTO violations, even? Now that would make a few people's day at the ISP. I can imagine some general fits of laughter.
From my limited observation, most people tend to have a "compressed" (for lack of a better word) perception of large distances, weights or times.
Sort of like Terry Pratchett's trolls, whose counting skills went "one, two, lots", but on a larger scale. Beyond a limit, for the vast majority of humans anything is just "lots".
I mean, picture one human in your mind. You can do that. 10 humans? No problem. 1000 humans? How about one _billion_ humans? It's, uh, "lots".
Do you know how long a day is? Not just theoretically, I mean. Well, yes, you experience that time interval every day. How about a year? It still works. How about a _billion_ years? Try to really imagine that interval in your head. It's, uh, "lots" of time.
In practice, for most humans the "lots" limit is even lower.
E.g., people have no trouble treating intervals like 20,000 years of a SF universe's history as a blip where nothing noteworthy happened. Yeah, sure, for 20,000 years noone designed a new ship or generally invented anything new. Now think that in half that time RL humans moved from living in caves to launching spaceships. (The first known city is less than 10,000 years old.)
So in fact, that "20,000 years" interval is perceived as a _much_ smaller one. Once you've reached the "lots" limit, everything above that is the same. If someone's "lots" limit for time is, say, 20 years, anything over that will be the same. Be it 20,000 years or a billion years, is in fact perceived as the exact same as 20 years.
Hence our fascination with stuff that could happen in a billion years or several billion years. (E.g., that our sun will eventually kill us all.) Because instinctively we perceive it at a much closer point in the future. It's in the same "lots" range a your kids' going into retirement.
(Incidentally, and just for the sake of a tangent, most people's inability to comprehend evolution. Stuff like billions of billions of billions of organisms, over billions of years, gets compressed to the same "lots" range as 100 cows on a farm over 20 years. And, duh, noone saw those evolve into something else.)
Well, it's just a wild hypothesis. I could well be wrong.
Consider that most of the oxygen you breathe comes from the sea. "Probably would kill land plants, too" just makes that problem worse.
Additionally, last I've heard about the other gamma-ray based extinction, the problem wasn't just wiping out the ozone layer, but replacing it with a brown layer of nitrous oxide. It caused, if I remember right, a massive glaciation that lasted a million years.
Think the "nuclear winter" theories. Same idea here, except that instead of a layer of dust blocking the sun, you have a thick brown layer of nitrous oxide.
So I'll say that while it might not make humans really extinct, it will very likely make their life a living hell. Well, the Norse frozen hell, rather than our burning brimstone one, but not a comfortable place to be in anyway.
1. Most civilized countries are sick and tired of SPAM too. E.g., most European countries. So there is enough scope for a spam free zone, if the USA does want to get its act together and cooperate. It's not like you're alone against the world on the SPAM issue, except for the fact that:
2. It's mostly your spam that's dumped upon the rest of the world. USA is currently _the_ biggest source of spam, followed by... offshored operations paid for by someone from the USA.
So on one hand, the USA could halve the SPAM traffic on its own, without even needing much international cooperation, if it actually got its act together. And on the other hand, hey, there's a lot of incentive for a lot of other countries to cooperate. Just show us where to sign, if it means we'll stop getting your crap in our inboxes.
3. Once you have secured an EU+North America treaty on that issue, the rest of the world should IMHO be actually pretty easy.
We're talking some major combined economic power there. Any country who doesn't want to play ball with that kind of a behemoth can be whacked into submission in a variety of ways, ranging from economic sanctions to just disconnecting them from the Internet.
Makes that country unattractive to spammers too in the process. See, I don't think spammers want to target the local citizens of Elbonia with their operations. You disconnect them from the rich targets, you've killed that operation. So any country which thought it'll get rich by sheltering spammers, will quickly lose that investment too and be left with just the other disadvantages.
So I think they'll play ball.
4. But I don't think the spammers want to move to Elbonia or East Bumfuckistan and run their operation from there anyway. They might pay some local 5 bucks to run a server for them there, but they don't want to go live in a third world country. Those countries aren't that much fun.
You may see that even for legitimate operations, IBM might offshore their tech support to India or China, but you won't see the CEO of IBM moving there. (And those are already developping countries, not third world ones.)
This "nuisance" is causing a real loss to businesses. Even a few seconds per Email at work means causing hundreds of millions lost to spam in the USA alone. In fact, it can be argued that it's actually worse for society than thievery: they cause 100 times more damage than the money they earn from it.
Also this "nuisance" isn't affraid to:
- pay for and spread viruses that act as spam zombies (more millions lost in IT wages dealing with those)
- scam and fraud (see how many spam ads are for "p3n1$ enl@rg3m3nt" frauds)
- try to ruin other people's reputation (see all the "joe jobs" aimed at anti-spam sites, or just using random innocent bystanders as scapegoats)
- DDOS/mailbomb/etc whoever criticizes them
- destroy, degrade and deface other people's resources
and a whole host of other behaviours ranging from anti-social to outright criminal.
Sorry, it seems to me like that's not just an "annoyance", like kids being noisy outside, it's a bunch of parasites draining society for their own good.
Also here's a concept for you: the punishment is supposed to make the crime not worth it. Those guys earn tens of millions out of their crime. Divide that by 9 years in prison leaves them with anything between several hundreds of thousands and _millions_ per year. That puts it into the range of being more rewarding than higher level management.
So if anything 9 years in prison is _too_ _little_ for these scumbags.
I mean, what next? Let's start giving 2 days community sentences to those who rob a bank, right?
And, oh, if they wanted to do a PHD instead, they could have done just that instead of spamming. Sorry, I see no point in that comparison.
Still, I don't know... there's quite a difference between "the magic is gone" and the outright avoiding email that we're seeing today. I think people still like to talk to other people, especially people sharing some common hobby/interest/whatever. It's no longer something new and fascinating, that's true, but we're still human and still noone's 100% introverted.
After all, you're reading Slashdot and actively taking part in the discussion at that. Obviously not minding all that much the possibility that some people (myself included) could be immature at times. You could have just as well gotten a bunch of "lol, you suck" answers, and I'm thinking you knew that, but that didn't stop you from posting.
So the magic may be gone, but the usefulness is IMHO still there.
And the fact that we've turned into a bunch of online hermits who'd rather hide from everyone, and would rather delete a message from a stranger than read it, is IMHO just diminishing that usefulness.
Actually, I'm more interested in which game. A game which becomes unplayable at 130ms nowadays is a piss-poorly written game. Even without server-side compensation for lag in the hit-detection (and god knows that no game has an excuse to lack that nowadays, but even without it) you'd usually just lose accuracy at long ranges on a 130ms ping. To actually become unplayable, IMHO you'd need something pretty extreme, like syncing every frame to the game server.
So if any game falls in that category, I sincerely want to know which, so I don't buy it by mistake.
The fact that you or I miss an email at home, yeah, it's annoying enough. But for a business to miss an important request from their largest customer, that can be _deadly_. Think the story (urban legend or not) about how DOS ended up the IBM PC operating system instead of CPM. It didn't involve email, but same idea: you fail to take some business opportunity, you could kick yourself for the rest of your days.
For example, as a business you can't just filter out every email that contains "to remove yourself", because that would also nuke all legitimate mailing lists or notifications from the clients' B2B e-commerce sites. Or you can't just set a draconic rule that filters out all emails from China, because you might actually do business with Chinese companies.
Which just makes the rest worse.
- Spam to business accounts wastes a _lot_ of people's time.
- Spam to usiness accounts costs more money than just the ISP bill. It also costs the salaries for all those people.
- The "clogginess of spam" is something a business has to deal with personally, usually in the form of more admin time, servers, etc.
- A small portion of morons make a small loss by causing you and the other businesses a _bigger_ loss.
Incidentally, I'd say that also means more people won't be shielded from spam anyway. I have coleagues whose inboxes at work are clogged by hundreds of messages a day. Even if they had God's own filter and rules at home, they still have to wade through that crap at work.
If anything, you just illustrate why spam is a problem.
Let me tell you a story. Back before SPAM, giving your email address to people was _not_ considered some "unwise use" of it. It was the _whole_ idea of email.
E.g., I put my email address in all my newsgroup posts. _Not_ because of being "SOOO important", but because some conversations that ensued were really just between two people. No point spamming the whole newsgroup with stuff that really didn't concern everyone else on that newsgroup.
Especially since it would be often off-topic for that newsgroup anyway. E.g., if I made the ISO standard dumb comparison to a car in a hardware newsgroup, I would fully expect that anyone going on a non-hardware-related car tangent (e.g., "actually, the <car model> doesn't have a diesel option") would do so in email.
If anything "e-penis" would have been the exact opposite: the/. kind of off-topic posts just to show that you know some obscure detail better than the poster. The "woo, I'm better than you because I know better about some irrelevant detail" or "you suck, because you misspelled a word" posts. Taking that kind of thing to email was actually considered the proper thing to do. (Mind you, I'm not saying that everyone stuck to doing the proper thing.)
Or, yes, when I wrote a game walkthrough, I did put both my email addresses in it. Not out of a sense of being "SOOO important", but simply because I _didn't_ consider it to be the alpha and omega of gaming walkthroughs. I figured that there _is_ plenty of stuff I had ommited, so email seemed like a good way to, you know, _communicate_ about that. Let people send me corrections, or ask additional questions.
It may no longer seem that obvious any more, but some of us actually used email to _communicate_ with people. Even strangers. That was the whole idea, in fact. (Family members already knew my telephone number, after all.)
Email was _not_ supposed to be some top secret, jealously kept secret even from idiot acquaintances who might leak it when they get virused. It was, in fact, _supposed_ to be usable for even perfect strangers to contact you, should they need to do that.
And that we've got at the point where all that got turned right on its head, well, you've just illustrated the damage that spam did. What should have been a valuable communication resource, got turned into something top secret and where a message from a stranger would more likely be deleted than read.
Oh, I know that fortune cookie. I also think it's wrong.
For starters, it's a nice utopia, but noone invented a school system which just makes everyone interested in knowledge. Most people will go to college just because they (A) think it will get them a better job in terms of money/effort/prestige/whatever, or (B) because their parents wanted them to. If you let them just set their own goals, knowledge won't even start to be on that list.
So while you'll have a tiny percentage of people who actually go there to learn, it will be by far not enough to supply the numbers of high education workers an economy needs.
Second, and most importantly, even those won't want to learn everything they really need.
I still remember being in college myself, you know. I was only interested in the programming part, I thought I knew it all already, and counted stuff as maths, data structures, or any attempt at teaching proper software engineering to be a waste of my time.
I mean, phbt, who the heck needs an object when you can use an array? And I'll write everything with "goto" just because it annoys the professor. And hello? WTH do I need maths for?
Needless to say, in retrospect all that was wrong.
Basically for Ralph Waldo Emersons quote to actually hold any water, 18 year olds would have to be a lot more mature and have a lot more experience than actually is the case. Note that I'm not saying that 18 year olds are dumb or anything. The brain sure is fully functional at that age, but the experience to base the right decisions on isn't there yet.
Well, actually the point was more that "yes, they did produce people who knew maths" rather than a describing a wonderful high school utopia. I'm guessing even most of us/. nerds would find that system more stressful than they think.
If anything, it wasn't a case of "I'm good at computers, so everyone must bow to me". It was more like being drowned in homework and dragged kicking and screaming through subjects you didn't even like. Even if you liked, say, maths, since that's the topic in the article, you'd be forced to become good in physics, chemistry, literature, history, geography, etc, above and beyond the levels needed in a USA school. Even if you hated half of those.
But since you mention bell curves and costs, methinks you have the completely wrong idea. I think it wasn't about saving costs at all.
In the whole communist block, education was paid for by the state at all levels, including university. So I'm guessing that, put into the perspective of their average wage and all, it actually meant a higher investment in education than in any western country nowadays.
Also, discarding the unfit, didn't even happen as early as you think. They did speed-bin people, but not that early, and definitely not early enough to really save much money.
Never said it prepared people for what came after, or anything. And I'm certainly refraining from any comments about social skills and nerds, seein' as, you know, I _am_ a nerd:P
I'm just saying that it did motivate a lot of people to at least try for the higher bins, and in the end it actually produced more than enough people who actually were good at maths, physics, or whatever.
Seein' as, you know, it was all in answer to a post which basically said "bah, it's all just their patriotic propaganda. They're no better at maths than Americans." Well, they _are_, and it's not just propaganda, it's just how their education system worked. That's all I'm saying.
What you fail to mention, though, is that being a miner was little more than a delayed death sentence. Even working in a mining town or in some heavy industry towns was a silicosis waiting to happen, or other health problems. There were mining towns in Eastern Europe that were _covered_ in black coal dust. Those guys hadn't even started to give a damn about working conditions or ecology.
Actually going down in the mine... well, let's just say, don't really make much plans about retirement. I.e., there was a helluva lot of incentive to _not_ end up in that kind of a job, money or no money.
So let'e me ammend what I wrote there. Maybe you didn't get the absolute best salary in a high education job, but you did get the highest overall job quality and life quality.
That's, no offense, bullshit. I can tell you first hand that the whole soviet block had a school system which is, sad to say, head and shoulder above anything the western world has to offer.
Their society had many faults, and their model didn't work in the long run. But it did stuff people with knowledge, and most importantly it motivated them to learn instead of just being the cool dumb jock or the skinny airhead.
1. Their whole school system was not an exercise in "let's have it at a level where everyone can understand it without effort." The whole school system was a merciless exercise in stuffing people with knowledge that maybe 10% fully understood in any particular subject, and noone could be good in all.
The eastern block school system had in effect, the same function as speed-binning CPUs in a factory has. They kept cranking up the level to see at which point you break. It was a filter to determine how much each can learn.
E.g., they never had a watered-down "science class" at any level. They started in elementary school with real physics and chemistry. By the last year of high school, they'd do quantum physics and advanced organic chemistry. And in maths you'd be surprised how early they got dragged into differentials, integrals and matrices.
Their inter-school contests, called "olympics" for some reason, were supposed to further filter the best of the best. Preparing for a physics "olympics" in high school involved physics manuals from Berkeley and other western universities. Again, they learned that in _high_ _school_.
2. More importantly, they had a helluva lot of incentive to actually learn.
See, your place in society was determined by your grades. E.g., at the end of university they'd be sorted by grades and have a go at selecting where they want to work, from a big list of available jobs nation-wide. I.e., if you did well, you could pick a job anywhere you wanted, while if you barely had passed, you'd pretty much be guaranteed to get a job in some forgotten village at the far end of the map.
Finding a job by personal networking and family friends was a lot harder than in the west. And it was regarded as the blatant corruption and nepotism that it really is. You needed really important friends to pull that kinda thing. (Being drinking pals with a low level team leader didn't even start to count as as a chance. Being a relative of a director or party official, maybe.)
Also wages were planned by the state, and pretty much determined by how much learning was involved in getting that job. E.g., an electronics engineer or doctor would get a lot better paid than a plumber.
3. The whole message society gave their students is "being smart is _good_". Being able to do well in that school system was a thing of pride, not a reason to be ridiculed as a nerd.
And you know why? Precisely because of the above. _Everyone_, including your cool classmates or your girlfriend _knew_ that grades translate directly into salary. The cool jock or the cool prom-queen airhead were cool and all, but everyone knew that they're gonna be the ones who barely scrape a living. (Unless, see above, they happened to be relatives of someone _really_ important. Not many had their luck.) So they had a helluva lot fewer admirers.
Well, I wasn't really planning to get into the "science or not science" debate. I'm more of a hard science fan myself, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
Let's just say: sociology _claims_ to be a science. (Again, I won't pass judgment on whether that's true or not.) Or at least to have a well defined field it studies. Then I'd expect the grades to reflect knowledge in _that_ field.
I mean, really, even taking the Astrology you mentioned: if anyone got grades in Astrology, I'd expect that to reflect how well they did in exactly that field: Astrology. None other. If those grades are really measuring their English grammar skill, then they're not Astrology grades.
See, the "you're the only link" guilt trip only applies when one really is the only link. I.e., when it's about people _you_ chose to interact with, and interactions _you_ had some control over. Simplifying the awfully complex graph of social and corporate interactions at work into "you're the only link" is an _awful_ over-simplification and just plain old false.
Example: a lot of the people you meet daily (including on the street, in the train, at the restaurant where you "did lunch" with a client, etc) are below average IQ. About half of them in fact. That's why it's an average. Does that make _you_ the only connection between stupid people?
I think you can see the problem by now.
Again, that kind of thing doesn't really apply for things that weren't under one's control to start with, and when indeed there was no other external common factor. E.g., if the 5th girlfriend just dumped you, yeah, you're the common link. E.g., if the 5th customer brought to you by the company's marketer is a clueless PHB, then chances are you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the marketter that brought them. E.g., if it's the 5th project which where you're asked to do overtime to implement changes, because the boss can't bring himself to tell the client "nope, we need more time to implement those", then you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the boss. Etc.
So just to clearly summarize it, in the case of an average employee:
- For the co-workers he's _not_ the "only common link". The real common link is the manager or HR person who hired them. Those decided the level of competence they wish to pay for, so, yeah, sometimes you're stuck working with incompetent or lazy people.
True story: I know of one department where they actually did a reverse auction for employees. No, it's not an urban legend. The ones who wanted the least money got hired, regardless of qualification or credentials. Needless to say, much to the existing workers' grief, their new coleagues were about as sharp as a bowling ball. Even if a really cheap bowling ball.
And methinks there it's a bit unfair to blame it on any team member as "you're the common link." No, the common link was the manager who had that stupid idea, in a misguided attempt to cut costs.
- For the clients, the real link is the marketting department that brought those.
- For the tools or technologies one has to use, or to support, again it's a tad unfair to blame the team member or tech support guy. He's not the one who chose them. The real common link is invariably a manager there.
Etc.
And in some cases the only honest thing to say is that someone is incompetent or lazy. It has nothing to do with "assassinating someone's integrity". Some people just do an awful job, and that's that.
Sure, you can pretend to be in some Wonderland where everyone is competent, noone makes any mistakes, everyone gives 100%, and half the corporate decisions aren't an equal split between ass-covering, brown-nosing, ego trips, corruption and nepotism. Quite a happy wonderland is that.
Unfortunately the real world doesn't work that way.
No ammount of soul-searching, seeing the other's point of view, or "maybe I'm the link" guilt trips can really explain stuff like: Coworker A needed 3 years to write the same module that Coworker B wrote in 6 hours. And Coworker B's version had far less bugs (we only found 1 so far, and it was in a library he used, not in his code), and ran 50 times faster. Actually benchmarked on very large real-world data sets, so no micro-benchmarking effects apply.
There's also the fact that Coworker A doesn't even know the very basics of the language he's paid to program in. No, seriously. He hadn't even heard of "call by value", so I had to help him debug his trying to assign a value to a parameter in a method, to change the variable used as a parameter to the method. Also hadn't ever heard of "linked list", "hash table" or the other absolute basics of computer programming.
So please tell me: how should I see that situation. What point of view should I see for him, that makes that one a perfectly competent and productive co-worker? It's not even a flame. I'm genuinely curious by now.
All the "but if it was an English class" posts make a nice alternate history what-if scenario, and all. No doubt there. Also an a very insightful observation on the role of English classes and essays.
But if you actually RTFA you'll see that we're talking about a _sociology_ professor and _sociology_ papers.
"If it's an English class, that's the whole point."
Well, precisely. That's the whole point: it's not an English class.
He's grading a _science_ class based on form instead of content. _That's_ the problem.
Unlike the English class in your example (which you are right about) his job _is_ to read and judge the content.
"The grade is based (in theory) on how well you meet the goals."
Except it turns the whole goal on its head. Instead of the goal being to bloody learn something, the goal becomes to just have a bogus text that can pass a (probably piss-poor) grammar checker and a dumb keyword scan.
All of a sudden cheating got easier: you don't even need to copy someone else's paper, and be caught by googling. You can just write any idiocy that's got the right sentence structure, and replace random words with keywords and names from a list someone else gave/sold you.
"It's closer to "if I have to read a poor explanation of a basic tenet of my field one more time, I'm going to kill someone...""
But guess what? That's his job.
So you're telling me that he's too bored to do his job. Fine. Then he can bloody look for another job.
Noone asks me if in _my_ job I'm too bored to read yet another program specification. I mean "oh, god, if I have to read another poor exercise in just asking for a PHBs favourite colours and fonts, I'm going to kill someone." Or "oh god, if I have to read another piss-poor piece of some unskilled monkey's code to find a bug, I'm gonna kill someone." Guess what? I'm paid to do that anyway. Noone will accept "oh, I coded a flight sim instead of an e-commerce site, because I couldn't be arsed to read yet another spec."
That's all I'm asking from him too: to do his job.
"I may be going out on a limb here, but I am willing to say there is virtually nothing interesting about papers written in introductory courses of any kind to anyone that is an expert in the field. They may be interesting to you, because you didn't previously know the information."
I may be going out on a limb here, but that's precisely why the course is there: because you didn't previously know that. Otherwise you could skip directly to the third year.
And his job isn't to learn new stuff from your paper, it's to make sure you understood those basics. Because otherwise going any further is building a house without a foundation. That paper isn't supposed to enlighten him, it's not supposed to entertain him, it's just supposed to prove to him that you've understood what he taught.
And part of his _job_, boring as it may be, is precisely to read all that back and see if you've actually understood that.
And again, that's all I'm asking of him: to do his bloody job. Or find another job, if the current one is too boring for his highness.
Dunno about you, but I'd expect someone's sociology grades to actually reflect some understanding of sociology. Same as I'd expect that their math grades reflect having learned some maths, or that the grades they get in their Java course reflect _some_ knowledge of Java.
Having sociology grades that reflect purely English grammar skills, is as sick a joke as grading someone's data structures course based purely on indentation. It misses the whole point and makes a mockery of the whole teaching process.
That's the first thing that came to mind as I was reading the summary: well, gee, so he can now grade purely on form, rather than content.
Sure, the program can analyze that the sentence flow and structure looks like it's analyzing/arguing/explaining/whatever a point. But is it even arguing the right point? Does that paper even _have_ a point at all, or is it just a babbledygook of random nouns/verbs/adjectives/etc that fits a structure?
I'm not even sure it has to end up "beautifully expressed babble", it can just be any collection of random words that fits the structure the program is looking for. I.e., I'm sure it can be _awful_ babble and still pass.
And indeed, a student then doesn't even have to understand how the program works or anything. A script will do just fine. Just download a paper that got good grades (hence, fits the idiot's program) and run it through a script that replaces each word with a random word that's in the same category. (Transient/intransient verb, noun, etc.)
E.g., take the following two sentences:
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced its prestigious Pioneer Awards today, and one of the three lucky winners for 2005 is Mitch Kapor."
"A Pink Smell Stew impaled its dormant Turkey Shaddow tomorrow, or five of the two spotted continuums towards 2005 equals Mitch Kapor."
It's just the random word substition I was talking about. It isn't even beautifully phrased babble, it's just awful even by dadaist criteria. Yet it has the exact same sentence flow and structure. Can the program even tell that the second is random blabber?
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Initially he said 12 months. So then it would be 2^40. At your 10 cents initial cost, it's 1.0995*10^11, or about 101,000,000,000 dollars.
But wait, he revised it later to say 24 months. So it's 2^20 = 1048576. At a 10 cents initial cost, it's 104,857.60$.
You know, reading your post just made my day.
That's exactly the thing that I was wondering about while reading all the "whoa, it held true for so long so it must be a law" or "whoa, he must have carefully plotted a curve through a large sample of data. Engineers who understand statistics don't grow on trees." bullshit posts. Was starting to lose faith in humanity already.
I mean, gee, it's like me postulating "Moraelin upgrades his computer at least once a year" as "Moraelin's Law". Self-fulfilling prophecy, here we come.
Yeah, I know that a concept of "rights" is becoming a pretty strange notion in the USA nowadays. Or that thinking for oneself is a baaad thing.
But basically all you're saying there is that France does still treat people as humans, not like a bunch of terrorists until proven innocent. E.g., yes, there was a demonstration. It may be surprising to you, but demonstrations _are_ a legal thing in a democracy.
Was _everyone_ in the demonstration an illegal immigrant? No, seriously? How do you know that there aren't also a bunch of french citizens in there?
(Believe it or not every single country has the current USA-style "immigrant = terrorist" scare, or even the same kind of nationalism. The french kind of nationalism for example is more about language and culture, than about being born there. So there could have been quite a bunch of people born in france who are sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to people whose only fault is not being born there.)
So what do you propose that the police should do? Arrest everyone and keep them in custody several days until they can check them all? Break a legal protest on the excuse that some people in that protest might be illegal immigrants?
Yeah, that excuse will soo come in handy next time when people protest something. Give that idea to Bush while you're at it: I'm sure he'll love doing that to the next anti-war demonstration. Hey, there _could_ be illegal Mexican immigrants or some wanted terrorists in that demonstration. Must make sure.
If you really believe that burying democracy alive is the right way to gain some vague promise of safety, you're so mistaken it's not even funny.
Or how about the common sense of being tactful there? You propose, what? That the police clashes with an already agitated group of demonstrators, to show them who's boss? Yeah, way to go to turn a peaceful demonstration into a riot.
So you're telling me, what? That unlike you, someone in the French police actually had a brain?
Briefly: put down the crack pipe, join a 12 step program, or see a competent surgeon about having your head removed from your ass.
Well, you're of course right, but that would ruin the metaphor I was trying to use :P
Just wanted to give the heads-up that firewrought got that right. I wasn't talking about being able to count to 20,000 or to 1,000,000, I was talking about people's perception of it. The gut feeling, so to speak.
:P
Or to put it otherwise, I wasn't talking about a limit where people become ignorant or anything, but a limit where it all becomes... abstract. Just a number. It's something you can't really use any kind of intuition about. Not because of being ignorant, but simply because you've never experienced or perceived with your senses anything even vaguely similar in scale.
Like, that you can imagine 10 people in your mind, but 1,000,000 people becomes just a number. That 10 ft is a distance you can imagine in your head. You can tell "ok, 3 ft is about from there to there." But 1 light year is just some abstract concept.
Sure, you can do maths with it, because you're a smart and educated person. You can maybe even convert it in hex in your head if you're alpha-geek, or to metres, parsecs and ft.
But all I'm saying is that you're past the limit of your intuition. It _only_ exists as an abstract number at that point. Your intuition doesn't place "1 billion years into the future" much farther than it places "next century". That's what I'm saying.
Of course, this just begs a question like "wth do I need my intuition for? I can work with it abstractly very well, thank you very much." Well, for solving a physics problem, you don't need any intuition, of course. To understand why someone would get worked up about something that's likely 1 billion years in the future, well, I think intuition makes a nice hypothesis
That is a very insightful observation, except for the fact that most people and countries don't give a damn about internet gambling. It's not like it actively goes spreading gambling-zombie viruses or actively goes forcing people to gamble, or anything.
So IMHO it doesn't even invalidate my point.
1. We're still talking about a simple offshoring operation. We're not really talking about having to _move_ there, because your country would throw you in prison for that operation.
I'm willing to bet that the people making money from those gambling operation still live comfortably in the USA or EU. If they actually faced a choice like "(A) personally move to a third world country, (B) shut down the operation, or (C) go to jail" I still believe that most would choose B.
But either way, it doesn't really either contradict or prove my point. It's just not the same situation.
2. Because noone is actively fighting Internet gambling, a country hosting those isn't in any danger of being disconnected from the 'net for that. I.e., it doesn't prove that point either.
Now let's think we were talking spam there. That all the world's spam was coming from a single third world nation, let's call it Elbonia. I'm thinking you can already see where this is going: everyone's spam filters and most ISP's would completely block emails from that block.
I.e., as I've described before, that country would find itself quickly off the net, and its spammers effectively disconnected from their source of income. Sure, the country may still encourage them. But suddenly they can't actually make money as long as they stay in that country. Are you that sure they wouldn't drop it like a hot potato?
3. As illustrated above, it doesn't even take any political effort to take a few bad apples off the net. Any third world country that becomes _the_ source of spam will just make every ISP's and admin's day: it's a single rule to block the trash. Incidentally, the rule that also takes that country off the net.
It's much the same as from half the world you can't make a credit card purchase any more. There was no political decree to start blocking those countries' citizens from online purchases. It's the banks themselves who eventually just had enough of those countries' encouraging fraud.
So what's China going to do there? Call my ISP and threaten with sanctions if they don't start allowing spam from China? Threaten my ISP with WTO violations, even? Now that would make a few people's day at the ISP. I can imagine some general fits of laughter.
From my limited observation, most people tend to have a "compressed" (for lack of a better word) perception of large distances, weights or times. Sort of like Terry Pratchett's trolls, whose counting skills went "one, two, lots", but on a larger scale. Beyond a limit, for the vast majority of humans anything is just "lots". I mean, picture one human in your mind. You can do that. 10 humans? No problem. 1000 humans? How about one _billion_ humans? It's, uh, "lots". Do you know how long a day is? Not just theoretically, I mean. Well, yes, you experience that time interval every day. How about a year? It still works. How about a _billion_ years? Try to really imagine that interval in your head. It's, uh, "lots" of time. In practice, for most humans the "lots" limit is even lower. E.g., people have no trouble treating intervals like 20,000 years of a SF universe's history as a blip where nothing noteworthy happened. Yeah, sure, for 20,000 years noone designed a new ship or generally invented anything new. Now think that in half that time RL humans moved from living in caves to launching spaceships. (The first known city is less than 10,000 years old.) So in fact, that "20,000 years" interval is perceived as a _much_ smaller one. Once you've reached the "lots" limit, everything above that is the same. If someone's "lots" limit for time is, say, 20 years, anything over that will be the same. Be it 20,000 years or a billion years, is in fact perceived as the exact same as 20 years. Hence our fascination with stuff that could happen in a billion years or several billion years. (E.g., that our sun will eventually kill us all.) Because instinctively we perceive it at a much closer point in the future. It's in the same "lots" range a your kids' going into retirement. (Incidentally, and just for the sake of a tangent, most people's inability to comprehend evolution. Stuff like billions of billions of billions of organisms, over billions of years, gets compressed to the same "lots" range as 100 cows on a farm over 20 years. And, duh, noone saw those evolve into something else.) Well, it's just a wild hypothesis. I could well be wrong.
Consider that most of the oxygen you breathe comes from the sea. "Probably would kill land plants, too" just makes that problem worse.
Additionally, last I've heard about the other gamma-ray based extinction, the problem wasn't just wiping out the ozone layer, but replacing it with a brown layer of nitrous oxide. It caused, if I remember right, a massive glaciation that lasted a million years.
Think the "nuclear winter" theories. Same idea here, except that instead of a layer of dust blocking the sun, you have a thick brown layer of nitrous oxide.
So I'll say that while it might not make humans really extinct, it will very likely make their life a living hell. Well, the Norse frozen hell, rather than our burning brimstone one, but not a comfortable place to be in anyway.
1. Most civilized countries are sick and tired of SPAM too. E.g., most European countries. So there is enough scope for a spam free zone, if the USA does want to get its act together and cooperate. It's not like you're alone against the world on the SPAM issue, except for the fact that:
2. It's mostly your spam that's dumped upon the rest of the world. USA is currently _the_ biggest source of spam, followed by... offshored operations paid for by someone from the USA.
So on one hand, the USA could halve the SPAM traffic on its own, without even needing much international cooperation, if it actually got its act together. And on the other hand, hey, there's a lot of incentive for a lot of other countries to cooperate. Just show us where to sign, if it means we'll stop getting your crap in our inboxes.
3. Once you have secured an EU+North America treaty on that issue, the rest of the world should IMHO be actually pretty easy.
We're talking some major combined economic power there. Any country who doesn't want to play ball with that kind of a behemoth can be whacked into submission in a variety of ways, ranging from economic sanctions to just disconnecting them from the Internet.
Makes that country unattractive to spammers too in the process. See, I don't think spammers want to target the local citizens of Elbonia with their operations. You disconnect them from the rich targets, you've killed that operation. So any country which thought it'll get rich by sheltering spammers, will quickly lose that investment too and be left with just the other disadvantages.
So I think they'll play ball.
4. But I don't think the spammers want to move to Elbonia or East Bumfuckistan and run their operation from there anyway. They might pay some local 5 bucks to run a server for them there, but they don't want to go live in a third world country. Those countries aren't that much fun.
You may see that even for legitimate operations, IBM might offshore their tech support to India or China, but you won't see the CEO of IBM moving there. (And those are already developping countries, not third world ones.)
This "nuisance" is causing a real loss to businesses. Even a few seconds per Email at work means causing hundreds of millions lost to spam in the USA alone. In fact, it can be argued that it's actually worse for society than thievery: they cause 100 times more damage than the money they earn from it.
Also this "nuisance" isn't affraid to:
- pay for and spread viruses that act as spam zombies (more millions lost in IT wages dealing with those)
- scam and fraud (see how many spam ads are for "p3n1$ enl@rg3m3nt" frauds)
- try to ruin other people's reputation (see all the "joe jobs" aimed at anti-spam sites, or just using random innocent bystanders as scapegoats)
- DDOS/mailbomb/etc whoever criticizes them
- destroy, degrade and deface other people's resources
and a whole host of other behaviours ranging from anti-social to outright criminal.
Sorry, it seems to me like that's not just an "annoyance", like kids being noisy outside, it's a bunch of parasites draining society for their own good.
Also here's a concept for you: the punishment is supposed to make the crime not worth it. Those guys earn tens of millions out of their crime. Divide that by 9 years in prison leaves them with anything between several hundreds of thousands and _millions_ per year. That puts it into the range of being more rewarding than higher level management.
So if anything 9 years in prison is _too_ _little_ for these scumbags.
I mean, what next? Let's start giving 2 days community sentences to those who rob a bank, right?
And, oh, if they wanted to do a PHD instead, they could have done just that instead of spamming. Sorry, I see no point in that comparison.
Well, that's a very insightful observation.
Still, I don't know... there's quite a difference between "the magic is gone" and the outright avoiding email that we're seeing today. I think people still like to talk to other people, especially people sharing some common hobby/interest/whatever. It's no longer something new and fascinating, that's true, but we're still human and still noone's 100% introverted.
After all, you're reading Slashdot and actively taking part in the discussion at that. Obviously not minding all that much the possibility that some people (myself included) could be immature at times. You could have just as well gotten a bunch of "lol, you suck" answers, and I'm thinking you knew that, but that didn't stop you from posting.
So the magic may be gone, but the usefulness is IMHO still there.
And the fact that we've turned into a bunch of online hermits who'd rather hide from everyone, and would rather delete a message from a stranger than read it, is IMHO just diminishing that usefulness.
Actually, I'm more interested in which game. A game which becomes unplayable at 130ms nowadays is a piss-poorly written game. Even without server-side compensation for lag in the hit-detection (and god knows that no game has an excuse to lack that nowadays, but even without it) you'd usually just lose accuracy at long ranges on a 130ms ping. To actually become unplayable, IMHO you'd need something pretty extreme, like syncing every frame to the game server.
So if any game falls in that category, I sincerely want to know which, so I don't buy it by mistake.
The fact that you or I miss an email at home, yeah, it's annoying enough. But for a business to miss an important request from their largest customer, that can be _deadly_. Think the story (urban legend or not) about how DOS ended up the IBM PC operating system instead of CPM. It didn't involve email, but same idea: you fail to take some business opportunity, you could kick yourself for the rest of your days.
For example, as a business you can't just filter out every email that contains "to remove yourself", because that would also nuke all legitimate mailing lists or notifications from the clients' B2B e-commerce sites. Or you can't just set a draconic rule that filters out all emails from China, because you might actually do business with Chinese companies.
Which just makes the rest worse.
- Spam to business accounts wastes a _lot_ of people's time.
- Spam to usiness accounts costs more money than just the ISP bill. It also costs the salaries for all those people.
- The "clogginess of spam" is something a business has to deal with personally, usually in the form of more admin time, servers, etc.
- A small portion of morons make a small loss by causing you and the other businesses a _bigger_ loss.
Incidentally, I'd say that also means more people won't be shielded from spam anyway. I have coleagues whose inboxes at work are clogged by hundreds of messages a day. Even if they had God's own filter and rules at home, they still have to wade through that crap at work.
If anything, you just illustrate why spam is a problem.
/. kind of off-topic posts just to show that you know some obscure detail better than the poster. The "woo, I'm better than you because I know better about some irrelevant detail" or "you suck, because you misspelled a word" posts. Taking that kind of thing to email was actually considered the proper thing to do. (Mind you, I'm not saying that everyone stuck to doing the proper thing.)
Let me tell you a story. Back before SPAM, giving your email address to people was _not_ considered some "unwise use" of it. It was the _whole_ idea of email.
E.g., I put my email address in all my newsgroup posts. _Not_ because of being "SOOO important", but because some conversations that ensued were really just between two people. No point spamming the whole newsgroup with stuff that really didn't concern everyone else on that newsgroup.
Especially since it would be often off-topic for that newsgroup anyway. E.g., if I made the ISO standard dumb comparison to a car in a hardware newsgroup, I would fully expect that anyone going on a non-hardware-related car tangent (e.g., "actually, the <car model> doesn't have a diesel option") would do so in email.
If anything "e-penis" would have been the exact opposite: the
Or, yes, when I wrote a game walkthrough, I did put both my email addresses in it. Not out of a sense of being "SOOO important", but simply because I _didn't_ consider it to be the alpha and omega of gaming walkthroughs. I figured that there _is_ plenty of stuff I had ommited, so email seemed like a good way to, you know, _communicate_ about that. Let people send me corrections, or ask additional questions.
It may no longer seem that obvious any more, but some of us actually used email to _communicate_ with people. Even strangers. That was the whole idea, in fact. (Family members already knew my telephone number, after all.)
Email was _not_ supposed to be some top secret, jealously kept secret even from idiot acquaintances who might leak it when they get virused. It was, in fact, _supposed_ to be usable for even perfect strangers to contact you, should they need to do that.
And that we've got at the point where all that got turned right on its head, well, you've just illustrated the damage that spam did. What should have been a valuable communication resource, got turned into something top secret and where a message from a stranger would more likely be deleted than read.
Oh, I know that fortune cookie. I also think it's wrong.
For starters, it's a nice utopia, but noone invented a school system which just makes everyone interested in knowledge. Most people will go to college just because they (A) think it will get them a better job in terms of money/effort/prestige/whatever, or (B) because their parents wanted them to. If you let them just set their own goals, knowledge won't even start to be on that list.
So while you'll have a tiny percentage of people who actually go there to learn, it will be by far not enough to supply the numbers of high education workers an economy needs.
Second, and most importantly, even those won't want to learn everything they really need.
I still remember being in college myself, you know. I was only interested in the programming part, I thought I knew it all already, and counted stuff as maths, data structures, or any attempt at teaching proper software engineering to be a waste of my time.
I mean, phbt, who the heck needs an object when you can use an array? And I'll write everything with "goto" just because it annoys the professor. And hello? WTH do I need maths for?
Needless to say, in retrospect all that was wrong.
Basically for Ralph Waldo Emersons quote to actually hold any water, 18 year olds would have to be a lot more mature and have a lot more experience than actually is the case. Note that I'm not saying that 18 year olds are dumb or anything. The brain sure is fully functional at that age, but the experience to base the right decisions on isn't there yet.
Well, actually the point was more that "yes, they did produce people who knew maths" rather than a describing a wonderful high school utopia. I'm guessing even most of us /. nerds would find that system more stressful than they think.
If anything, it wasn't a case of "I'm good at computers, so everyone must bow to me". It was more like being drowned in homework and dragged kicking and screaming through subjects you didn't even like. Even if you liked, say, maths, since that's the topic in the article, you'd be forced to become good in physics, chemistry, literature, history, geography, etc, above and beyond the levels needed in a USA school. Even if you hated half of those.
But since you mention bell curves and costs, methinks you have the completely wrong idea. I think it wasn't about saving costs at all.
In the whole communist block, education was paid for by the state at all levels, including university. So I'm guessing that, put into the perspective of their average wage and all, it actually meant a higher investment in education than in any western country nowadays.
Also, discarding the unfit, didn't even happen as early as you think. They did speed-bin people, but not that early, and definitely not early enough to really save much money.
Never said it prepared people for what came after, or anything. And I'm certainly refraining from any comments about social skills and nerds, seein' as, you know, I _am_ a nerd :P
I'm just saying that it did motivate a lot of people to at least try for the higher bins, and in the end it actually produced more than enough people who actually were good at maths, physics, or whatever.
Seein' as, you know, it was all in answer to a post which basically said "bah, it's all just their patriotic propaganda. They're no better at maths than Americans." Well, they _are_, and it's not just propaganda, it's just how their education system worked. That's all I'm saying.
What you fail to mention, though, is that being a miner was little more than a delayed death sentence. Even working in a mining town or in some heavy industry towns was a silicosis waiting to happen, or other health problems. There were mining towns in Eastern Europe that were _covered_ in black coal dust. Those guys hadn't even started to give a damn about working conditions or ecology.
Actually going down in the mine... well, let's just say, don't really make much plans about retirement. I.e., there was a helluva lot of incentive to _not_ end up in that kind of a job, money or no money.
So let'e me ammend what I wrote there. Maybe you didn't get the absolute best salary in a high education job, but you did get the highest overall job quality and life quality.
That's, no offense, bullshit. I can tell you first hand that the whole soviet block had a school system which is, sad to say, head and shoulder above anything the western world has to offer.
Their society had many faults, and their model didn't work in the long run. But it did stuff people with knowledge, and most importantly it motivated them to learn instead of just being the cool dumb jock or the skinny airhead.
1. Their whole school system was not an exercise in "let's have it at a level where everyone can understand it without effort." The whole school system was a merciless exercise in stuffing people with knowledge that maybe 10% fully understood in any particular subject, and noone could be good in all.
The eastern block school system had in effect, the same function as speed-binning CPUs in a factory has. They kept cranking up the level to see at which point you break. It was a filter to determine how much each can learn.
E.g., they never had a watered-down "science class" at any level. They started in elementary school with real physics and chemistry. By the last year of high school, they'd do quantum physics and advanced organic chemistry. And in maths you'd be surprised how early they got dragged into differentials, integrals and matrices.
Their inter-school contests, called "olympics" for some reason, were supposed to further filter the best of the best. Preparing for a physics "olympics" in high school involved physics manuals from Berkeley and other western universities. Again, they learned that in _high_ _school_.
2. More importantly, they had a helluva lot of incentive to actually learn.
See, your place in society was determined by your grades. E.g., at the end of university they'd be sorted by grades and have a go at selecting where they want to work, from a big list of available jobs nation-wide. I.e., if you did well, you could pick a job anywhere you wanted, while if you barely had passed, you'd pretty much be guaranteed to get a job in some forgotten village at the far end of the map.
Finding a job by personal networking and family friends was a lot harder than in the west. And it was regarded as the blatant corruption and nepotism that it really is. You needed really important friends to pull that kinda thing. (Being drinking pals with a low level team leader didn't even start to count as as a chance. Being a relative of a director or party official, maybe.)
Also wages were planned by the state, and pretty much determined by how much learning was involved in getting that job. E.g., an electronics engineer or doctor would get a lot better paid than a plumber.
3. The whole message society gave their students is "being smart is _good_". Being able to do well in that school system was a thing of pride, not a reason to be ridiculed as a nerd.
And you know why? Precisely because of the above. _Everyone_, including your cool classmates or your girlfriend _knew_ that grades translate directly into salary. The cool jock or the cool prom-queen airhead were cool and all, but everyone knew that they're gonna be the ones who barely scrape a living. (Unless, see above, they happened to be relatives of someone _really_ important. Not many had their luck.) So they had a helluva lot fewer admirers.
Well, I wasn't really planning to get into the "science or not science" debate. I'm more of a hard science fan myself, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make.
Let's just say: sociology _claims_ to be a science. (Again, I won't pass judgment on whether that's true or not.) Or at least to have a well defined field it studies. Then I'd expect the grades to reflect knowledge in _that_ field.
I mean, really, even taking the Astrology you mentioned: if anyone got grades in Astrology, I'd expect that to reflect how well they did in exactly that field: Astrology. None other. If those grades are really measuring their English grammar skill, then they're not Astrology grades.
That's all I'm saying.
See, the "you're the only link" guilt trip only applies when one really is the only link. I.e., when it's about people _you_ chose to interact with, and interactions _you_ had some control over. Simplifying the awfully complex graph of social and corporate interactions at work into "you're the only link" is an _awful_ over-simplification and just plain old false.
Example: a lot of the people you meet daily (including on the street, in the train, at the restaurant where you "did lunch" with a client, etc) are below average IQ. About half of them in fact. That's why it's an average. Does that make _you_ the only connection between stupid people?
I think you can see the problem by now.
Again, that kind of thing doesn't really apply for things that weren't under one's control to start with, and when indeed there was no other external common factor. E.g., if the 5th girlfriend just dumped you, yeah, you're the common link. E.g., if the 5th customer brought to you by the company's marketer is a clueless PHB, then chances are you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the marketter that brought them. E.g., if it's the 5th project which where you're asked to do overtime to implement changes, because the boss can't bring himself to tell the client "nope, we need more time to implement those", then you're _not_ the common link. The common link is the boss. Etc.
So just to clearly summarize it, in the case of an average employee:
- For the co-workers he's _not_ the "only common link". The real common link is the manager or HR person who hired them. Those decided the level of competence they wish to pay for, so, yeah, sometimes you're stuck working with incompetent or lazy people.
True story: I know of one department where they actually did a reverse auction for employees. No, it's not an urban legend. The ones who wanted the least money got hired, regardless of qualification or credentials. Needless to say, much to the existing workers' grief, their new coleagues were about as sharp as a bowling ball. Even if a really cheap bowling ball.
And methinks there it's a bit unfair to blame it on any team member as "you're the common link." No, the common link was the manager who had that stupid idea, in a misguided attempt to cut costs.
- For the clients, the real link is the marketting department that brought those.
- For the tools or technologies one has to use, or to support, again it's a tad unfair to blame the team member or tech support guy. He's not the one who chose them. The real common link is invariably a manager there.
Etc.
And in some cases the only honest thing to say is that someone is incompetent or lazy. It has nothing to do with "assassinating someone's integrity". Some people just do an awful job, and that's that.
Sure, you can pretend to be in some Wonderland where everyone is competent, noone makes any mistakes, everyone gives 100%, and half the corporate decisions aren't an equal split between ass-covering, brown-nosing, ego trips, corruption and nepotism. Quite a happy wonderland is that.
Unfortunately the real world doesn't work that way.
No ammount of soul-searching, seeing the other's point of view, or "maybe I'm the link" guilt trips can really explain stuff like: Coworker A needed 3 years to write the same module that Coworker B wrote in 6 hours. And Coworker B's version had far less bugs (we only found 1 so far, and it was in a library he used, not in his code), and ran 50 times faster. Actually benchmarked on very large real-world data sets, so no micro-benchmarking effects apply.
There's also the fact that Coworker A doesn't even know the very basics of the language he's paid to program in. No, seriously. He hadn't even heard of "call by value", so I had to help him debug his trying to assign a value to a parameter in a method, to change the variable used as a parameter to the method. Also hadn't ever heard of "linked list", "hash table" or the other absolute basics of computer programming.
So please tell me: how should I see that situation. What point of view should I see for him, that makes that one a perfectly competent and productive co-worker? It's not even a flame. I'm genuinely curious by now.
All the "but if it was an English class" posts make a nice alternate history what-if scenario, and all. No doubt there. Also an a very insightful observation on the role of English classes and essays.
But if you actually RTFA you'll see that we're talking about a _sociology_ professor and _sociology_ papers.
"If it's an English class, that's the whole point."
Well, precisely. That's the whole point: it's not an English class.
He's grading a _science_ class based on form instead of content. _That's_ the problem.
Unlike the English class in your example (which you are right about) his job _is_ to read and judge the content.
"The grade is based (in theory) on how well you meet the goals."
Except it turns the whole goal on its head. Instead of the goal being to bloody learn something, the goal becomes to just have a bogus text that can pass a (probably piss-poor) grammar checker and a dumb keyword scan.
All of a sudden cheating got easier: you don't even need to copy someone else's paper, and be caught by googling. You can just write any idiocy that's got the right sentence structure, and replace random words with keywords and names from a list someone else gave/sold you.
"It's closer to "if I have to read a poor explanation of a basic tenet of my field one more time, I'm going to kill someone...""
But guess what? That's his job.
So you're telling me that he's too bored to do his job. Fine. Then he can bloody look for another job.
Noone asks me if in _my_ job I'm too bored to read yet another program specification. I mean "oh, god, if I have to read another poor exercise in just asking for a PHBs favourite colours and fonts, I'm going to kill someone." Or "oh god, if I have to read another piss-poor piece of some unskilled monkey's code to find a bug, I'm gonna kill someone." Guess what? I'm paid to do that anyway. Noone will accept "oh, I coded a flight sim instead of an e-commerce site, because I couldn't be arsed to read yet another spec."
That's all I'm asking from him too: to do his job.
"I may be going out on a limb here, but I am willing to say there is virtually nothing interesting about papers written in introductory courses of any kind to anyone that is an expert in the field. They may be interesting to you, because you didn't previously know the information."
I may be going out on a limb here, but that's precisely why the course is there: because you didn't previously know that. Otherwise you could skip directly to the third year.
And his job isn't to learn new stuff from your paper, it's to make sure you understood those basics. Because otherwise going any further is building a house without a foundation. That paper isn't supposed to enlighten him, it's not supposed to entertain him, it's just supposed to prove to him that you've understood what he taught.
And part of his _job_, boring as it may be, is precisely to read all that back and see if you've actually understood that.
And again, that's all I'm asking of him: to do his bloody job. Or find another job, if the current one is too boring for his highness.
Dunno about you, but I'd expect someone's sociology grades to actually reflect some understanding of sociology. Same as I'd expect that their math grades reflect having learned some maths, or that the grades they get in their Java course reflect _some_ knowledge of Java.
Having sociology grades that reflect purely English grammar skills, is as sick a joke as grading someone's data structures course based purely on indentation. It misses the whole point and makes a mockery of the whole teaching process.
That's the first thing that came to mind as I was reading the summary: well, gee, so he can now grade purely on form, rather than content.
Sure, the program can analyze that the sentence flow and structure looks like it's analyzing/arguing/explaining/whatever a point. But is it even arguing the right point? Does that paper even _have_ a point at all, or is it just a babbledygook of random nouns/verbs/adjectives/etc that fits a structure?
I'm not even sure it has to end up "beautifully expressed babble", it can just be any collection of random words that fits the structure the program is looking for. I.e., I'm sure it can be _awful_ babble and still pass.
And indeed, a student then doesn't even have to understand how the program works or anything. A script will do just fine. Just download a paper that got good grades (hence, fits the idiot's program) and run it through a script that replaces each word with a random word that's in the same category. (Transient/intransient verb, noun, etc.)
E.g., take the following two sentences:
"The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced its prestigious Pioneer Awards today, and one of the three lucky winners for 2005 is Mitch Kapor."
"A Pink Smell Stew impaled its dormant Turkey Shaddow tomorrow, or five of the two spotted continuums towards 2005 equals Mitch Kapor."
It's just the random word substition I was talking about. It isn't even beautifully phrased babble, it's just awful even by dadaist criteria. Yet it has the exact same sentence flow and structure. Can the program even tell that the second is random blabber?