LOTF removes the children from human society and plonks them into a wilderness, then observes as pure evil emerges stepwise from the simple combination of human nature and untamed nature.
American schools, and school children, should be so lucky. They are surrounded by the clutter of the most superficial urban culture ever invented, a culture where role models are those who steal and accumulate the most, a culture where success is never long-term, always immediate, a culture that worships violence and venerates the Law without the need for Reason.
AFAIR it was WW3, or some other abstract catacylsm. But that was largely a literary device to explain why the youngsters were abandoned, it was not Golding's story. The story was the inevitable descent into primitive playground barbarism and final salvation thanks to the appearance of the adult naval office.
I suspect that Golding was beaten-up a lot as a kid, and believed that (other) children were basically nasty.
The irony is that Golding was half-right: primitive human societies are notoriously violent, and he was right to attack the myth of the "noble savage". But it is his use of children as the metaphor for humankind which stinks, not to mention the total ignorance of the actual mechanisms that cause violence in human cultures: competition for basic resources, for accessibility to sex, and for status.
The capacity for violence is obviously innate, but it is (except in pathological individuals) a calculated and partially learned response to specific situations, not a default behaviour.
I just can't stand this book being taught to children by adults who believe it's a good lesson: "behave, or we'll abandon you to own your bloody nature".
The COO of a large pharmaceutical corporation explained why his firm was lobbying for a ban on all new forms of medicinal research...
Symantec make their money from viruses. Why on earth should we take their pronouncements in any other light? Their dream world is one in which only the criminals and the megacorporations have access to the technology, so that the citizenry squashed between the two can pay a jolly penny.
It's ridiculous. The only defense against malware is transparency, competition, and the evolution of something approaching a natural defense system. Not suppression of the tools people need in order to develop their defenses.
LOTF is just well-dressed propaganda, teaching youngsters that without the guiding adult hand they inevitably descend into primitive violence. No coincidence it's such a favorite of teachers.
Life's real stories of youngsters abandoned shows something quite different. In the Polish ghettos, Nazi camps, streets of Rio and of Kinshasa... children form groups and look after each other.
The most flagrant examples of children acting violently are wars in which adults abduct children and train them as soldiers: Colombia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Liberia, and many other cases... it's the adults doing the damage.
Children don't have holy water running through their veins, but they do not embody naked evil either. They just try to get along. LOTF is a caricature, based on the idea of "original sin", saying that we ar civilized only because society keeps us in check. Bullshit. Society is an expression of our human nature, and civilization is a natural consequence of our innate desire for an easy life and our built-in mechanisms for conflict avoidance.
All data is suspect, but data that is kept secret is most suspect.
By mandating total transparency of data, the community can actually act to verify and "clean" it. Think of reputation management systems. Think of journalists: professional reputation managers, to some extent.
It would change the world we live in, but the only alternative I see is more of what we have today, namely data as a weapon of oppression and exploitation for those with sufficient money and power.
When personal data is confidential, only governments and big business will have access to it. When personal data is public, even corrupt officials will be forced to behave.
The genie is out of the bottle, and it seems that only laws to mandate total and full access to all data by anyone who wants it will protect us from those who would seek to use such power against us.
Yes, I know it'd be a nightmare if anyone could monitor my phone records, but the nightmare could become quite fun if it went both ways.
Panic Shmanic
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Frea of the potential abuses of technology are as old as technology itself. I'm sure the first fire starters were considered sorcerers who would bring the wrath of the gods on your village if they were unhappy (i.e. burn it down at midnight).
Technology is netural, people use it and abuse it, but it does not take an RFID tag to make a man a monster.
Actually, the above post was not an ignorant troll but a serious response to what I read on Sun's own website. If my reaction that "this desktop runs Java applications" is an ignorant troll, then how on earth can Sun justify this kind of marketing.
"Java" is a brand name, now? I'm seriously amazed. So, can we expect Java Office, which is not an Office suite written Java but StarOffice put under a new "brand name"? How about "Java Linux"?
Seriously, the people doing the trolling here are Sun, misusing the name of a language to promote something that is barely different from many other Linux distributions. Or desktops. Or whatever the thing is.
Studies have shown that male animals (of various species) that are kept separated from females all their lifes can live up to 20% longer. In other words having no sex lets you live longer. The combination of forced abstinence and strict diet can add decades to a person's life.
As a Belgian Radio announcer commented when this result was published, this finally explains why Catholic priests have a surprising tendency to die around 28.
I was searching for the correct description of this article, you have provided it, thank you!
Note to slashdot editors: how about a special icon representing "spooge"? And can we vote stories into the "spooge" category? That'd be uncomplainingly spoogy cool!!
With the reviews claiming that "StarOffice 7" is as good as the forthcoming MSOffice, and now this review claiming that what is essentially a repackaged Linux distro is a competitor for Windows XP... and the noise around MadHatter...
It sounds simply like there are a couple of very busy marketing and communications people at Sun who have been calling in the tabs with their journalist friends.
I know the review implies that it is a Linux distro, using Gnome and running StarOffice and various OSS apps, but the Sun description of the Java Desktop implies a Java-only platform with "Gnome look and feel", which is not quite the same thing.
The review and Sun's own pages appear to be describing two different things. Perhaps simply because Sun wants to push the Java aspects, something that I suspect interests relatively few people.
Perhaps the fact that there is a demo CD but nothing to actually try makes the discussion a little moot.
So, we can rewrite 20 years of software for this desktop?
The three most important things about a new platform are: applications, applications, applications. I know the world was meant to switch to Java some time in 1998, but somehow it did not happen except for a certain class (sorry) of application service.
Anyone who wants to hide information or communicate securely can. Governments are trying very hard to keep up with the technological curve but IMHO they are falling behind, not moving ahead of it.
It's not so obvious for western countries because we're right in the middle of the action, but it's clearer when you look at regimes like China, Vietnam, etc. where Internet access is seen as subversive (goddamn right it is!) and tightly controlled. Well, every time they block one route, another few routes open up.
P2P illustrates the problem for controlling authorities fairly well. Technology is now so pervasive and powerful that any attempt to repress the flow of information simply generates multiple new communication routes. Human ingenuity is incredibly hard to suppress, and the more you try, the more it resists.
The only way governments can regain control of the Internet is to license every connection and shoot or imprison every programmer. This is kind of unlikely.
Ah, the pool is not random but the selection is. Afghanistan, Liberia, Congo, Peru, Algeria, Chechnia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Uganda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Guinee Conakry, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Colombia,...
In any of these countries and many more - this is just a partial list of the top of my tongue - you will find a disproportionate number of young men embedded in a cycle of violence that has nothing at all to do with values learned from their parents, and everything to do with surviving in a violent culture.
Thus the cycle of violence: to survive in a violent society you must become violent. We can only break the cycle by imposing a system of defined crime and punishment managed widely and evenly from the outside, namely a set of laws enforced by the state.
Violent influences + Inadequate parental/teach guidance = Bad things happen
There is an interesting pseudo-parallel in states. An ineffective government generally correlates with increased violence. The reason seems to be that there is a natural cycle of violence which the state can break by enforcing a standard law (and set of punishments). Without this enforcement, the only means of defense is often offense, and this rapidly turns into the vendetta-style violence seen in many places where there is no law. "Taking the law into my own hands" is usually a recipe for disaster.
But... but... parents are not lawmakers, since they cannot intervene in peer conflicts. Yes, they can beat up on their own children, but that is not the problem. The problem is other children: youth violence between kids is what creates and sustains this kind of violent culture.
Parents are simultaneously handicapped from doing anything really useful, since they are absent from the scene, and yet they are blamed all the time.
Who is the authority figure that can act the "State" when kids beat each other up and fall into vendetta-style cycles of violence? Not mum and dad... Answer that question satisfactorily and you have the key to keeping children safe from violence and violent behaviour.
1. Instant on, instant off 2. It don't break when you drop it 3. You can take it to the beach 4. You can hide it inside another book to look smart 5. You can hide it inside a porno mag to look cool 6. You can paper the cover 7. You can leave it on a bus seat 8. It never runs out of batteries 9. A rack of them look impressive up against the wall
But, on the other hand:
1. You never get them back when you lend them out 2. If you do, you wish you hadn't 3. You can't search them, so you have to flip back and forwards 4. You can't run them through the Jargonizer to see what the author would have sounded like in Hillbilly 5. You can't print them and give them to someone, saying "hey, look at this cool web page" 6. You can't hyper link to them. 7. You can't cut and paste the good bits to make you look smart on slashdot (like that was difficult!)
But then again,
10. No girl ever fell for you because you were browsing a cool web page
You have to be very careful when drawing parallels like this.
Our closest living relatives are the Bonobo chimps, and they resolve every conflict through sex. The females have enormous clitorides and they have sex an average of 1.5 times per hour when awake, with other females, young males, older males, even infants males.
All very interesting but rather irrelevant when discussing human sexuality.
Elephants are very sophisticated animals and intelligent, and form groupings in which one male dominates the other males, and "excess" males are ejected and go rogue, being basically useless to the herd.
All very interesting but rather irrelevant to the human family structure.
Human families are built around the mother, and human economics are built around the father. The two are important but for different reasons, and studies have shown that children raised in single-parent families (single mother, not father) are not measurably different in character or tendency than children from whole families. But they are a lot poorer. And poverty is a good road to crime, but certainly not the only one.
And incidentally, a "village" is a whole family. The mother/father/two kids nuclear family is a modern invention designed to allow people to work more efficiently in industrial societies. It is entirely artificial. The only real "family" structure, anywhere on earth, is the extended family, and this is the village.
Immigrant children: the point is not that they pick up the local language faster (of course they do, they're younger). The point is that they do not speak their parents' language barely as well as their adopted language.
Language is such a basic vehicle of learning that this discrepancy would be astonishing if children really learnt most of their culture and behaviour from their parents. But of course the reason is much simpler: children, from the age of 2 or so, spend most of their formative time with other children, and since this is the culture in which they have to grow and compete, they learn it to the very best of their abilities. Their parents' culture is useful, interesting, but always comes in second place.
This is, I know, an extremely controversial discussion, because it seems to hit at the core of everything we've been taught about how we become who we are.
The basis for my statement that parents are less important (how much less is debatable) than peers comes from the book "The Nurture Assumption", by Judith Harris, written in 1998. It's an excellent book, for which Harris was flamed to pieces by the establishment for daring to suggest that we are not entirely the products of our upbringing (thus the title of her book).
The low impact of parents can be seen in two specific cases.
One, difficult to find, is twins that are raised separately: compare the types of family they are raised in, compare the peer groups they grow up in. I can't point you to specific examples, sorry.
Two, much easier to find, is immigrant children. Observe how they learn the language and habits of their peers much more than the language and habits of their parents. I live in an immigrant neighbourhood, and it is a striking effect.
The point is this: blaming the parents is an old game that delivers no results. Look elsewhere, and perhaps there is a way to resolve the problem. It is unfortunate that the science of psychology is so firmly rooted in a mentality that is becoming more and more outdated as we discover just how much of our nature is carried in our genes and in our cultures, and how cultures are spread much more horizontally than vertically.
Which is why children sing songs that are sometimes hundreds of years old, and which no parent has ever taught them.
Slashdot Mirror
LOTF removes the children from human society and plonks them into a wilderness, then observes as pure evil emerges stepwise from the simple combination of human nature and untamed nature.
American schools, and school children, should be so lucky. They are surrounded by the clutter of the most superficial urban culture ever invented, a culture where role models are those who steal and accumulate the most, a culture where success is never long-term, always immediate, a culture that worships violence and venerates the Law without the need for Reason.
Really not the same thing at all.
AFAIR it was WW3, or some other abstract catacylsm. But that was largely a literary device to explain why the youngsters were abandoned, it was not Golding's story. The story was the inevitable descent into primitive playground barbarism and final salvation thanks to the appearance of the adult naval office.
I suspect that Golding was beaten-up a lot as a kid, and believed that (other) children were basically nasty.
The irony is that Golding was half-right: primitive human societies are notoriously violent, and he was right to attack the myth of the "noble savage". But it is his use of children as the metaphor for humankind which stinks, not to mention the total ignorance of the actual mechanisms that cause violence in human cultures: competition for basic resources, for accessibility to sex, and for status.
The capacity for violence is obviously innate, but it is (except in pathological individuals) a calculated and partially learned response to specific situations, not a default behaviour.
I just can't stand this book being taught to children by adults who believe it's a good lesson: "behave, or we'll abandon you to own your bloody nature".
The COO of a large pharmaceutical corporation explained why his firm was lobbying for a ban on all new forms of medicinal research...
Symantec make their money from viruses. Why on earth should we take their pronouncements in any other light? Their dream world is one in which only the criminals and the megacorporations have access to the technology, so that the citizenry squashed between the two can pay a jolly penny.
It's ridiculous. The only defense against malware is transparency, competition, and the evolution of something approaching a natural defense system. Not suppression of the tools people need in order to develop their defenses.
LOTF is just well-dressed propaganda, teaching youngsters that without the guiding adult hand they inevitably descend into primitive violence. No coincidence it's such a favorite of teachers.
Life's real stories of youngsters abandoned shows something quite different. In the Polish ghettos, Nazi camps, streets of Rio and of Kinshasa... children form groups and look after each other.
The most flagrant examples of children acting violently are wars in which adults abduct children and train them as soldiers: Colombia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Liberia, and many other cases... it's the adults doing the damage.
Children don't have holy water running through their veins, but they do not embody naked evil either. They just try to get along. LOTF is a caricature, based on the idea of "original sin", saying that we ar civilized only because society keeps us in check. Bullshit. Society is an expression of our human nature, and civilization is a natural consequence of our innate desire for an easy life and our built-in mechanisms for conflict avoidance.
All data is suspect, but data that is kept secret is most suspect.
By mandating total transparency of data, the community can actually act to verify and "clean" it. Think of reputation management systems. Think of journalists: professional reputation managers, to some extent.
It would change the world we live in, but the only alternative I see is more of what we have today, namely data as a weapon of oppression and exploitation for those with sufficient money and power.
There are really only two approaches:
1. Ignore.
2. Embrace.
And of course the SCO option (insanity).
On the Ignore side: MS, Sun.
On the Embrace side: IBM, Apple.
Guess which companies will still be around in 5 years' time?
Where everyone knows all your secrets...
When personal data is confidential, only governments and big business will have access to it. When personal data is public, even corrupt officials will be forced to behave.
The genie is out of the bottle, and it seems that only laws to mandate total and full access to all data by anyone who wants it will protect us from those who would seek to use such power against us.
Yes, I know it'd be a nightmare if anyone could monitor my phone records, but the nightmare could become quite fun if it went both ways.
Frea of the potential abuses of technology are as old as technology itself. I'm sure the first fire starters were considered sorcerers who would bring the wrath of the gods on your village if they were unhappy (i.e. burn it down at midnight).
Technology is netural, people use it and abuse it, but it does not take an RFID tag to make a man a monster.
Don't take humour too seriously.
Actually, the above post was not an ignorant troll but a serious response to what I read on Sun's own website. If my reaction that "this desktop runs Java applications" is an ignorant troll, then how on earth can Sun justify this kind of marketing.
"Java" is a brand name, now? I'm seriously amazed. So, can we expect Java Office, which is not an Office suite written Java but StarOffice put under a new "brand name"? How about "Java Linux"?
Seriously, the people doing the trolling here are Sun, misusing the name of a language to promote something that is barely different from many other Linux distributions. Or desktops. Or whatever the thing is.
Studies have shown that male animals (of various species) that are kept separated from females all their lifes can live up to 20% longer. In other words having no sex lets you live longer. The combination of forced abstinence and strict diet can add decades to a person's life.
As a Belgian Radio announcer commented when this result was published, this finally explains why Catholic priests have a surprising tendency to die around 28.
I was searching for the correct description of this article, you have provided it, thank you!
Note to slashdot editors: how about a special icon representing "spooge"? And can we vote stories into the "spooge" category? That'd be uncomplainingly spoogy cool!!
With the reviews claiming that "StarOffice 7" is as good as the forthcoming MSOffice, and now this review claiming that what is essentially a repackaged Linux distro is a competitor for Windows XP... and the noise around MadHatter...
It sounds simply like there are a couple of very busy marketing and communications people at Sun who have been calling in the tabs with their journalist friends.
I know the review implies that it is a Linux distro, using Gnome and running StarOffice and various OSS apps, but the Sun description of the Java Desktop implies a Java-only platform with "Gnome look and feel", which is not quite the same thing.
The review and Sun's own pages appear to be describing two different things. Perhaps simply because Sun wants to push the Java aspects, something that I suspect interests relatively few people.
Perhaps the fact that there is a demo CD but nothing to actually try makes the discussion a little moot.
So, we can rewrite 20 years of software for this desktop?
The three most important things about a new platform are: applications, applications, applications. I know the world was meant to switch to Java some time in 1998, but somehow it did not happen except for a certain class (sorry) of application service.
1. Microsoft spend millions on a new search engine that eventually finds its way into a Win2K3 service pack.
2. For the next three years we hear lots of hype about the new MS search engine.
3. Microsoft buy Google and rename their engine as MSN.
4. Microsoft make massive changes to the new MSN and break it totally.
5. More releases.
6. More releases.
7. The MSN now finally works, more or less.
8. A new startup invents a new web portal metaphore, possibly based on smells.
9. The Redmond Boys start looking for smell engineers.
10. Go back to 1.
Reuters reports that a huge queue of Chinese wannabe astronauts are forming following rumours that in outer space, nobody can watch you surf.
Makes the discussion a little out of date.
Anyone who wants to hide information or communicate securely can. Governments are trying very hard to keep up with the technological curve but IMHO they are falling behind, not moving ahead of it.
It's not so obvious for western countries because we're right in the middle of the action, but it's clearer when you look at regimes like China, Vietnam, etc. where Internet access is seen as subversive (goddamn right it is!) and tightly controlled. Well, every time they block one route, another few routes open up.
P2P illustrates the problem for controlling authorities fairly well. Technology is now so pervasive and powerful that any attempt to repress the flow of information simply generates multiple new communication routes. Human ingenuity is incredibly hard to suppress, and the more you try, the more it resists.
The only way governments can regain control of the Internet is to license every connection and shoot or imprison every programmer. This is kind of unlikely.
Ah, the pool is not random but the selection is. Afghanistan, Liberia, Congo, Peru, Algeria, Chechnia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Uganda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Guinee Conakry, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Colombia,...
In any of these countries and many more - this is just a partial list of the top of my tongue - you will find a disproportionate number of young men embedded in a cycle of violence that has nothing at all to do with values learned from their parents, and everything to do with surviving in a violent culture.
Thus the cycle of violence: to survive in a violent society you must become violent. We can only break the cycle by imposing a system of defined crime and punishment managed widely and evenly from the outside, namely a set of laws enforced by the state.
Violent influences + Inadequate parental/teach guidance = Bad things happen
There is an interesting pseudo-parallel in states. An ineffective government generally correlates with increased violence. The reason seems to be that there is a natural cycle of violence which the state can break by enforcing a standard law (and set of punishments). Without this enforcement, the only means of defense is often offense, and this rapidly turns into the vendetta-style violence seen in many places where there is no law. "Taking the law into my own hands" is usually a recipe for disaster.
But... but... parents are not lawmakers, since they cannot intervene in peer conflicts. Yes, they can beat up on their own children, but that is not the problem. The problem is other children: youth violence between kids is what creates and sustains this kind of violent culture.
Parents are simultaneously handicapped from doing anything really useful, since they are absent from the scene, and yet they are blamed all the time.
Who is the authority figure that can act the "State" when kids beat each other up and fall into vendetta-style cycles of violence? Not mum and dad... Answer that question satisfactorily and you have the key to keeping children safe from violence and violent behaviour.
1. Instant on, instant off
2. It don't break when you drop it
3. You can take it to the beach
4. You can hide it inside another book to look smart
5. You can hide it inside a porno mag to look cool
6. You can paper the cover
7. You can leave it on a bus seat
8. It never runs out of batteries
9. A rack of them look impressive up against the wall
But, on the other hand:
1. You never get them back when you lend them out
2. If you do, you wish you hadn't
3. You can't search them, so you have to flip back and forwards
4. You can't run them through the Jargonizer to see what the author would have sounded like in Hillbilly
5. You can't print them and give them to someone, saying "hey, look at this cool web page"
6. You can't hyper link to them.
7. You can't cut and paste the good bits to make you look smart on slashdot (like that was difficult!)
But then again,
10. No girl ever fell for you because you were browsing a cool web page
You have to be very careful when drawing parallels like this.
Our closest living relatives are the Bonobo chimps, and they resolve every conflict through sex. The females have enormous clitorides and they have sex an average of 1.5 times per hour when awake, with other females, young males, older males, even infants males.
All very interesting but rather irrelevant when discussing human sexuality.
Elephants are very sophisticated animals and intelligent, and form groupings in which one male dominates the other males, and "excess" males are ejected and go rogue, being basically useless to the herd.
All very interesting but rather irrelevant to the human family structure.
Human families are built around the mother, and human economics are built around the father. The two are important but for different reasons, and studies have shown that children raised in single-parent families (single mother, not father) are not measurably different in character or tendency than children from whole families. But they are a lot poorer. And poverty is a good road to crime, but certainly not the only one.
And incidentally, a "village" is a whole family. The mother/father/two kids nuclear family is a modern invention designed to allow people to work more efficiently in industrial societies. It is entirely artificial. The only real "family" structure, anywhere on earth, is the extended family, and this is the village.
Immigrant children: the point is not that they pick up the local language faster (of course they do, they're younger). The point is that they do not speak their parents' language barely as well as their adopted language.
Language is such a basic vehicle of learning that this discrepancy would be astonishing if children really learnt most of their culture and behaviour from their parents. But of course the reason is much simpler: children, from the age of 2 or so, spend most of their formative time with other children, and since this is the culture in which they have to grow and compete, they learn it to the very best of their abilities. Their parents' culture is useful, interesting, but always comes in second place.
Perhaps because parents are spending less than 5% of time with their kids nowadays?
This is very true, and part of the problem: schools seem to believe we live in an agricultural economy, not one in which parents work from 8 to 6.
But think back to when you were a child: how much did you learn from your parents, how much did you learn from your peers, and how much is just "you"?
This is, I know, an extremely controversial discussion, because it seems to hit at the core of everything we've been taught about how we become who we are.
The basis for my statement that parents are less important (how much less is debatable) than peers comes from the book "The Nurture Assumption", by Judith Harris, written in 1998. It's an excellent book, for which Harris was flamed to pieces by the establishment for daring to suggest that we are not entirely the products of our upbringing (thus the title of her book).
The low impact of parents can be seen in two specific cases.
One, difficult to find, is twins that are raised separately: compare the types of family they are raised in, compare the peer groups they grow up in. I can't point you to specific examples, sorry.
Two, much easier to find, is immigrant children. Observe how they learn the language and habits of their peers much more than the language and habits of their parents. I live in an immigrant neighbourhood, and it is a striking effect.
The point is this: blaming the parents is an old game that delivers no results. Look elsewhere, and perhaps there is a way to resolve the problem. It is unfortunate that the science of psychology is so firmly rooted in a mentality that is becoming more and more outdated as we discover just how much of our nature is carried in our genes and in our cultures, and how cultures are spread much more horizontally than vertically.
Which is why children sing songs that are sometimes hundreds of years old, and which no parent has ever taught them.