Indeed! This is Not News at all. A professor at my school not only bans laptops in the classroom, he demands homework be written by hand, ostensibly for pedagogical reasons...
I don't see anything wrong with fitting the books and philosiphies of Ayn Rand into your moral philosophy. There's good stuff in there. But no, it's not the end-all and be-all of moral philosophy, and you do need more - hey, anyone basing their entire moral philosophy off one book is probably going to have something a little skewed. (Apologies to fundamentalists everywhere, those within Christianity and elsewhere...)
The Fountainhead shows the ultimately ugly tyrannical end of unrestrained socialism and communalism. It's not its job to show the ultimate ugly end of individualism and anarchy. If you don't overdo it, it has an excellent point, and a point that Slashdot (being full of Geeks and such) perhaps ought to understand. Its hero is a geek. He asks questions about why things work the way they do. But his Society doesn't like him asking questions, they make fun of him, and put him in a crew of street-sweepers so that he doesn't cause any problems. When he nevertheless goes off and rediscovers the electric light, all the so-called scientists and community leaders run after it (and him) to see it destroyed, because it will damage their ultra-long-term plans for the candle-making industry. If you're not holding up the book as either Holy Scripture or Unholy Nonsense, you can take away a lesson: that deep down inside, Society as a whole can be ugly, and try to crush any ounce of nonconformity. And like a good book, it doesn't answer questions so much as it raises them: What do you do with this lesson? Umm... Good question. Just keep it in the back of your mind.
The essential paradox of the American liberals is that even as they celebrate Diversity and Tolerance and all sorts of effusive good stuff like that, when they sic the government on a social problem, they oh-so-slowly push society further towards that bland monoculture. The other component of this paradox is that even as they speak out for Freedom and Expression and Choice on some topics, as soon as a red cent enters the equation, this concern evaporates. Freedom of choice- unless you're choosing to spend your money at Wal*Mart or McDonald's. Freedom of expression, and the Press, unless someone's spending money on it, in which case we'll install campaign-finance laws. And for all that the Right is supposedly the capitalist/materialistic bunch, I think that the epitome of the spirit of materialism is found on the parts of the Left who are most concerned about the injustice of income inequalities: yes, the suffering of the poor may be terrible, but no, it's not terrible because they have a Rich Person to compare themselves to... and especially in this country, when even the poor have color televisions, it can become spurious. As for the railing on about how unfair it is that sports stars have their millions while someone more worthy- usually schoolteachers- only make a pittance.... this sort of complaint is to give in and say that "money is the only thing that matters". Well, maybe not the Only thing. But it's the only thing you're complaining about.
Anyway. Umm, mod me -1 Offtopic. And then -1 Troll or Flamebait since I dare defend Rand. Yes! CRUSH THE INDEPENDENT THINKER AND PROVE HER RIGHT!!!;)
First all: be cautious of "universal" programs because too often the government takes the "universal" tag to cloak something which is really "mandatory". Especially health care programs, for instance.
In any event, as for the problem at hand: I don't trust the government to run my Internet connection either. Just look at how well they run the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Post Office, or Amtrak. (Beware the Libertarian political cartoons!:)
Created an "artifact"? What qualifies? If I take one of Second Life's "prims" and just place a sphere somewhere in space, does that count? I think the statistics are... overrated.
And how on Earth does he come up with the hour figure exactly?
Indiana University's Kelley Business School had a CIS class for undergraduates that featured a final similar to this where students had to secure computers and take turns attacking each others machines.
Wake Forest is the original ThinkPad university. They just renewed their contract for another ten years about a year or so ago, shortly before the ThinkPads were sold to Lenovo. They're also dumping all sorts of cash into "cutting-edge" stuff like "pervasive computing" and "multimodal" the like... much of this was my internship last summer. [/plug]
Let me put it this way. Charity is all well and good, of course, but who are you to tell me that I have no right to sell my organs to some rich dude(s) in need of a transplant, if I want to? I can see objection to government funding, in whole or in part or directly or indirectly, of such matters, but...
Drugs and therapies are developed which will make the most profit, not necessarily do the most good. It's viagra vs. a cure for AIDS. They find lots of treatments, but not a lot of cures. Why is that?
Reality check. Cures are hard. Very hard, probably several orders of magnitude harder than treatments. No one has cures for viruses! They never have. Right now, medical "cures" still mostly fall into Vaccines (for viruses- and they need to be administered beforehand) and Antibiotics (for bacteria, and a few similar substances for funky other stuff).
The Star Trek-like notion that medicine should be able to trivially cure any disease is surprisingly pervasive, but Medicine is not up to the task yet. It's not even close. So don't blame a conspiracy by evil evil drug companies because the doctor can't give you a pill to make you grow a new kidney.
It's not just "Business". Business is people. Businesses don't want to pay more because people don't want to pay more. Think about it: When was the last time you went to a restraunt? Okay. You've just supported the restraunt, and their employees. Now: when was the last time you bought a particle from a particle physics group? What do you mean, you've never done that?
If waitresses are paid more it's because people actually get a tangible benefit from them and are willing to pay for it. Particle physics, now, is all fine and dandy, but they're not coming up with anything but Abstract Knowledge which will remain pretty theoretical for years to come. Which are you more willing to pay for: a tasty dinner with good service at Applebees, or a tiny fraction of a new experiment at Fermilab?
Stop blaming Evil Evil Business and start taking an honest look at the economics of the thing from a few more angles.
Iranians hate America not because we refuse to submit to Islam, but because we propped up an unpopular monarchy, have constantly threatened, meddled with, and embargoed their country, impede their development of technology, and because we support an antagonistic nuclear power in their back yard with money and weapons.
Even if the rest is assumed to be true, they also hate us because we refuse to submit to Islam, on top of all that. And that's the popular excuse for hating us these days as well, and an excuse for hating Joe Citizen instead of just the government or the army or such. And if you give it enough time and it'll change from just the Excuse to a real Reason.
Note that there are economies of scale from the generation of power in large quantities. When you have a big nuclear plant, you can pipe a whole lot of heat and power through one set of heat exchangers, get some really big high-efficiency generators, voltage regulators, have one skilled maintainence crew... If you've got a bunch of little generators spread around, that's just that much more equipment to grow old and need maintainence and periodic replacement.
I'm not saying that decentralized power won't be present at all in The Future. But discarding centralized power generation entirely would be foolish. Use all the tools you have at your disposal as appropriate. The Future will involve both.
Slashdot Mirror
Google?
Indeed! This is Not News at all. A professor at my school not only bans laptops in the classroom, he demands homework be written by hand, ostensibly for pedagogical reasons...
The Fountainhead shows the ultimately ugly tyrannical end of unrestrained socialism and communalism. It's not its job to show the ultimate ugly end of individualism and anarchy. If you don't overdo it, it has an excellent point, and a point that Slashdot (being full of Geeks and such) perhaps ought to understand. Its hero is a geek. He asks questions about why things work the way they do. But his Society doesn't like him asking questions, they make fun of him, and put him in a crew of street-sweepers so that he doesn't cause any problems. When he nevertheless goes off and rediscovers the electric light, all the so-called scientists and community leaders run after it (and him) to see it destroyed, because it will damage their ultra-long-term plans for the candle-making industry. If you're not holding up the book as either Holy Scripture or Unholy Nonsense, you can take away a lesson: that deep down inside, Society as a whole can be ugly, and try to crush any ounce of nonconformity. And like a good book, it doesn't answer questions so much as it raises them: What do you do with this lesson? Umm... Good question. Just keep it in the back of your mind.
The essential paradox of the American liberals is that even as they celebrate Diversity and Tolerance and all sorts of effusive good stuff like that, when they sic the government on a social problem, they oh-so-slowly push society further towards that bland monoculture. The other component of this paradox is that even as they speak out for Freedom and Expression and Choice on some topics, as soon as a red cent enters the equation, this concern evaporates. Freedom of choice- unless you're choosing to spend your money at Wal*Mart or McDonald's. Freedom of expression, and the Press, unless someone's spending money on it, in which case we'll install campaign-finance laws. And for all that the Right is supposedly the capitalist/materialistic bunch, I think that the epitome of the spirit of materialism is found on the parts of the Left who are most concerned about the injustice of income inequalities: yes, the suffering of the poor may be terrible, but no, it's not terrible because they have a Rich Person to compare themselves to... and especially in this country, when even the poor have color televisions, it can become spurious. As for the railing on about how unfair it is that sports stars have their millions while someone more worthy- usually schoolteachers- only make a pittance.... this sort of complaint is to give in and say that "money is the only thing that matters". Well, maybe not the Only thing. But it's the only thing you're complaining about.
Anyway. Umm, mod me -1 Offtopic. And then -1 Troll or Flamebait since I dare defend Rand. Yes! CRUSH THE INDEPENDENT THINKER AND PROVE HER RIGHT!!! ;)
1) You're helping Mozilla.org find bugs.
2) Because you can.
Hey, sounds like he's taking a page from an old Impressions Games franchise... hmm.
In any event, as for the problem at hand: I don't trust the government to run my Internet connection either. Just look at how well they run the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Post Office, or Amtrak. (Beware the Libertarian political cartoons! :)
Not hypocrites. Just a diversity of opinion within a crowd, and a general bias on Slashdot for "bashing" comments in general. =P
And how on Earth does he come up with the hour figure exactly?
Dean of Corrections? good lord... =b
Wake Forest is the original ThinkPad university. They just renewed their contract for another ten years about a year or so ago, shortly before the ThinkPads were sold to Lenovo. They're also dumping all sorts of cash into "cutting-edge" stuff like "pervasive computing" and "multimodal" the like... much of this was my internship last summer. [/plug]
Let me put it this way. Charity is all well and good, of course, but who are you to tell me that I have no right to sell my organs to some rich dude(s) in need of a transplant, if I want to? I can see objection to government funding, in whole or in part or directly or indirectly, of such matters, but...
The Star Trek-like notion that medicine should be able to trivially cure any disease is surprisingly pervasive, but Medicine is not up to the task yet. It's not even close. So don't blame a conspiracy by evil evil drug companies because the doctor can't give you a pill to make you grow a new kidney.
If waitresses are paid more it's because people actually get a tangible benefit from them and are willing to pay for it. Particle physics, now, is all fine and dandy, but they're not coming up with anything but Abstract Knowledge which will remain pretty theoretical for years to come. Which are you more willing to pay for: a tasty dinner with good service at Applebees, or a tiny fraction of a new experiment at Fermilab?
Stop blaming Evil Evil Business and start taking an honest look at the economics of the thing from a few more angles.
No, I'm dreadfully sorry. You can not, I repeat, cannot have, a "do-over".
I'm not saying that decentralized power won't be present at all in The Future. But discarding centralized power generation entirely would be foolish. Use all the tools you have at your disposal as appropriate. The Future will involve both.
No, not really. But come on. Dump it in Yucca Mountain and damn the anti-nuclear environmentalists.
I remember a tale of a certain Mr. Cummings somewhere as well.
Reminds me of a recent John Crighton essay on the topic of "environmentalism as religion"... so where does this leave RMS? :)
It doesn't help that Javascript is the world's most misunderstood programming language.
That's not nerd-speak. That's management-speak!
Eeeeek, get it away from meeeeeee!!!!!
THIS post is off-topic.
Ajax was a king of Salamis, and a legendary hero of ancient Greece.