It is complete and utter nonsense. These people are so obsessed with the idea that science and knowledge and inventiveness can solve all our problems that they've neglected the actual process of technological development, which is filled with ideas that look good on paper but don't work when you try them in the real world.
When it comes to solving problems, nothing beats hard work, not even the "singularity".
Well, Mr. Smarty guy, if solving our problems isn't based on technological developments and the advancement of knowledge, what 'hard work' is required to solve them?
Man you are depressing me. My wife and I just had a little girl and I've been dreaming about all the lego sets i'll be buying her in a few years... Tell me i won't have to give up on encouraging my little girl to give engineering a chance!
Many vendors reserve the right to deny goods and services for any reason (as long as those reasons aren't racial/sex/etc prejudices that are prohibited by law) they see fit. I wouldn't want to do business with a spammer either.
I'll bet the ISP had a line in the service contract that spelled out specifically their right to terminate the contract for just that reason.
I think if you follow the point of the article to it's ultimate logical conclusion, it makes the point that perhaps the reputation that is such a giant draw isn't earned in all cases. Part of the reputation is probably a result of the US News's reports, I know when I was picking a school all of my contemporaries certainly viewed it as the bible from which was pronounced the word.
If the rankings were more statistically driven instead of by the whims of "experts", these unearned reputations might start to evaporate. The reputation of any social institution could be described as being based on the people that are produced as a result of it, the hype surrounding it, and of the network of people attached to it. Make the hype approximate the actual educational result produced by the school (based on your own personal priorities) and maybe the reputations will change on a long enough timeline.
Also, from the article:
The pair point out that their methods can't address another of the fundamental criticisms of the U.S. News evaluations, that the magazine chooses the wrong factors to base their evaluations on in the first place.
If there are serious criticisms about the factors U.S. News uses to rank colleges by even the flawed methods of these "experts", maybe a more statistical method is even more superior than the results of this preliminary study. If the rankings could be done in a superior fashion by an algorithm that accounts for ALL qualities of interest, configured to reflect personal priorities, there may be even more room for improvement. Not that there isn't a place for a personal touch, but the data should come first...
I read a little of the back-story on your first link, and it seems to be a little deeper than the sensationalist headline would lead you to believe:
"...One of the concerns that Ms. Snyder's cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking, expressed to Ms. Snyder throughout the semester was the importance of maintaining a professional working relationship with students and not to become overly familiar with them regarding her personal life. Among other things, Ms. Snyder had been inviting students to log onto her MySpace Web site, and Ms. Reinking counseled her repeatedly to stop doing so."
The issue doesn't seem to be as cut and dry as the slashdot headline, and you might still think she was wronged after knowing the whole story, but I hope you can at least appreciate that it doesn't seem to be all about a stupid picture on the interwebs.
And on your second link, people usually take many things into account when deciding to hire/accept into college/date someone, a lot of them are things that are arguably more unfair (your appearance, your race, your gender, etc.). At least with a social networking profile, you can make more substantive prejudgments on who they want to show themselves to be and what kind of friends they surround themselves with.
People are going to judge you based on many superficial, irrelevant things. At least when i have a profile or online presence, there's a better chance that they might choose to accept me for who I am and the accomplishments I've made, not just what I look like.
Thank you Kombat for completely undermining the societal contribution of art, and equating it to the angsty whining of 'self-absorbed drug addicts'. How can you say that your 'masters of the craft' deserve such praise when their entire careers depend on the refinement of the art that someone else creates. Sure they take a diamond in the rough and process it to the point where it can be sold and marketted, but without the rough diamond, their job would not even exist.
Not all artists are your Britney Spears archetype and a great many people (myself included) derive a very big portion of their existential meaning out of music and the effect it has on their life. Talented singers are not interchangable as you claim (have you ever actually watched American Idol?) and even if they were, singing is not the only value added to the art by them. They are our cultural focal points and deal with more stress in a year than you will likely deal with in a lifetime.
Maybe you don't care for what music adds to society, but for many people, art is what makes life worth living.
Maybe I'm just putting the idea out in a place where other people can read it, so they can join me. Perhaps that is a better use of my time, to put together a following so more people than just me can attack the problem.
Fine, I agree with the civil-liberties nazis claiming that he can't be forced to go in for testing. But I also think that people should use every legal means necessary to coerce him to do so. Just because it is illegal to arrest the guy and drag him to the hospital in handcuffs, doesn't mean that you can't torture him emotionally until he bends to societies will. Write the guy letters, 10 a day, call him on the phone, show up at his house, his work, his family events, make this guy feel like millions of people around the world will spit on him and hate him for the rest of his life until he does what is the utilitarian "right thing" to do.
Fall just short of actually physically making this man do what you want using illegal means, and he will eventually give in.
I have faith in the bickering of nations, this is not going to be a problem for people in general, but is likely to be one for the US. If the US ends up patenting all of the genes in the human body (colleges/private firms/etc.) Europe/China/Whoever will not be likely to pay the US companies for the right to research them and create products based on the genes. All this will mean is that when the best research minds start leaving to work in a country with a more sensible patent structure, the US will just have to scramble to overturn their corrupt, special interest laws.
I'm not saying I'm not dissapointed in the low-lifes we have dictating our patent procedures, but I think the system will correct itself, it will just be a costly lesson.
Honestly, what percentage of computer users play complex 3D games... I don't know, but according to this article, 15% of all games purchased are for the PC, the rest being console games. PCs will still be sold, but as a niche item for the hardcore gamer/media designer/engineers (who will always need mega number crunching power), which would mean that Sun-president-dude is right.
The high end user PCs don't have to have to die to become a relic, you could say that record players are relics, but hardcore audiophiles still buy their media in record form and buy/maintain the players. The point is, web-based services WILL marginalize the PC, and ultimately console games will win out over PC games. Gaming consoles are purpose built devices, and it is very difficult for a multi-purpose swiss army knife of a computer to do a better job than a similar cost console that had every design decision directed towards game performance.
Its not about you getting your 3GB/s gaming link to your low end terminal at home, its about the other 9/10 people getting their 2Mb/s link to surf the web. We PC gamers have been playing on borrowed time, and the false notion that Sally actually needs to buy a 3.8 GHz machine to write that letter to gramma will is in the process of being debunked. Intel/AMD build faster processors because they can make people want them, but I don't think they can do that forever...Enjoy it while it lasts!
You like surfing around the internet without dealing with blockages like the ones that the people in china have to deal with? You like the fact that you work as a Techie in this country and not a middle-manager or a salesman: that your job is one of the few that hasn't been outsourced?
Yes, i'm being over-dramatic, but to demonstrate a point... O'Connor was often the center point in a left/right decision and if she is replaced with a neo-conservative, the loosely defined balance that exists now will dissapear.
If you decide that someone has something valuable to say based only on their method of communication, than you have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and probably for a while. some of the smartest people i know have no care for spelling, punctuation or other such masturbation. its those (yes i know it is it's) that care about the silly details that generally are overcompensating.
Just wanted to let the parent know that he is right, and the grandparent is wrong. Incremental progress is what is needed for success, thats why i voted democrat instead of socialist... Those that say say a solution is useless unless it is 100% effective do more damage than those that stand against the solution entirely.
Tell this to the kid whose mother is in and out of rehab and has never met his father. Who was born with congenital defects due to his mothers' drug use during pregnancy. Or tell it even to the child whose poor parents weren't able to send him to any school other than the one he's currently at, where answering questions in class gets him beat up, and not joining a gang will seriously stunt his chances at "not being killed". Get a fucking clue.
KU, you are exactly the reason why evolution should not be swept under the rug in favor of a more religion-friendly scientific agenda. You seem like an incredibly well-educated logically thinking human-being whose only real failing (from the progressive perspective) is lack of knowledge on evolution. If the southern-schools are filled with more of this example of a person, the liberal agenda is easily implemented with exposure to raw facts.
Evolution is like a house of cards, just like all science. From the beginning of the theory to present, each new fossil record and ingenious analysis thereof has added another card to the house. If someone were to find a ill-fitting card and put it on the house and caused it to collapse, it would join the ranks of the many other discarded scientific theories. If the truth is what you seek, find that card, don't attack the scientific method of discovery in general!
The population will not reach 15 billion. Go to google, and search for world population growth. The experts agree on a rough number of 9 billion being the peak of a growth in population. It seems that worldwide population growth rate has been declining from the earlier worrisome numbers (that created the 15 billion dollar figure) and is now at around 1.2% and falling rapidly. It seems that the explosion was due to women having traditional numbers of children, expecting a high mortality rate, but due to our increased medical knowledge, infant mortality has dropped. The birth rate has now declined in tandem, which is why rates are on the way down.
Heat from my laptop? I'm sorry i don't see where this is going... My aparment has a hot-water heater that generates more heat in an hour than my laptop does in 2 weeks.
To be honest, i don't know about the problems in the gulf of mexico, but certainly don't assume that humanity is going to use petroleum for our extended future, it seems there are many more techs being developed (fusion, etc) that will support our needs.
I think that the utopian communism is not just possible while freedom and choice exist, it is inevitable. We are witnessing the beginning of it on the open-source front.
What is the major problem with communism as a principle? The idea that if we all work at our jobs, everyone can feed from the social trough. Each according to their need, each giving according to their talents. What is the problem with this system? What if my talent is cleaning up pig-manure, and your talent is being a rockstar? The problem with communism is i don't want to clean up shit, and most other people don't either. Doing things for the good of society will motivate even good-natured people to work only 'so' hard.
Why are we at the forefront of the *real* communism? Because we as programmers exist in a virtual world where distribution is *free*. If I create something in the digital world, there is no production cost to distribute it. Sure, i'm not going to work very hard at creating it, i do have to eat, and open source doesn't pay the bills; but I don't write software just because i have a deep-seated communist star trek upbringing (which I do) I write it because i want to. I write it because i'm creative, and some people paint, some people write poetry, i make software. This is the core behind utopian communism. It is not a sacrifice for me to do something I love, so my investment in the good of society is minimal. If the software i create makes other people happy, than great, they can use it too, but i'm going to write it either way.
As we progress technically, we find that we are more productive in the work we do. The amount of human labor that needs to be invested in a job is decreasing all the time. If the trends continue, it is not impossible to see an eventual ad-hoc communism, like the one that has arisen in the world of the computer. If communism arises out of society, it will be a natural progression, not a forced one. If it takes one person to run a farm that can produce food for 1000 people, with no additional costs, giving the food away will be as mindless a decision as putting your software on the web for all to use.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine, just please leave a comment explaining why you are doing things in a non-standard way.
It is complete and utter nonsense. These people are so obsessed with the idea that science and knowledge and inventiveness can solve all our problems that they've neglected the actual process of technological development, which is filled with ideas that look good on paper but don't work when you try them in the real world. When it comes to solving problems, nothing beats hard work, not even the "singularity".
Well, Mr. Smarty guy, if solving our problems isn't based on technological developments and the advancement of knowledge, what 'hard work' is required to solve them?
Have you read the book?
Man you are depressing me. My wife and I just had a little girl and I've been dreaming about all the lego sets i'll be buying her in a few years... Tell me i won't have to give up on encouraging my little girl to give engineering a chance!
Many vendors reserve the right to deny goods and services for any reason (as long as those reasons aren't racial/sex/etc prejudices that are prohibited by law) they see fit. I wouldn't want to do business with a spammer either.
I'll bet the ISP had a line in the service contract that spelled out specifically their right to terminate the contract for just that reason.
If the rankings were more statistically driven instead of by the whims of "experts", these unearned reputations might start to evaporate. The reputation of any social institution could be described as being based on the people that are produced as a result of it, the hype surrounding it, and of the network of people attached to it. Make the hype approximate the actual educational result produced by the school (based on your own personal priorities) and maybe the reputations will change on a long enough timeline.
Also, from the article:
The pair point out that their methods can't address another of the fundamental criticisms of the U.S. News evaluations, that the magazine chooses the wrong factors to base their evaluations on in the first place.
If there are serious criticisms about the factors U.S. News uses to rank colleges by even the flawed methods of these "experts", maybe a more statistical method is even more superior than the results of this preliminary study. If the rankings could be done in a superior fashion by an algorithm that accounts for ALL qualities of interest, configured to reflect personal priorities, there may be even more room for improvement. Not that there isn't a place for a personal touch, but the data should come first...
"...One of the concerns that Ms. Snyder's cooperating teacher, Nicole Reinking, expressed to Ms. Snyder throughout the semester was the importance of maintaining a professional working relationship with students and not to become overly familiar with them regarding her personal life. Among other things, Ms. Snyder had been inviting students to log onto her MySpace Web site, and Ms. Reinking counseled her repeatedly to stop doing so."
The issue doesn't seem to be as cut and dry as the slashdot headline, and you might still think she was wronged after knowing the whole story, but I hope you can at least appreciate that it doesn't seem to be all about a stupid picture on the interwebs.
And on your second link, people usually take many things into account when deciding to hire/accept into college/date someone, a lot of them are things that are arguably more unfair (your appearance, your race, your gender, etc.). At least with a social networking profile, you can make more substantive prejudgments on who they want to show themselves to be and what kind of friends they surround themselves with.
People are going to judge you based on many superficial, irrelevant things. At least when i have a profile or online presence, there's a better chance that they might choose to accept me for who I am and the accomplishments I've made, not just what I look like.
Thank you Kombat for completely undermining the societal contribution of art, and equating it to the angsty whining of 'self-absorbed drug addicts'. How can you say that your 'masters of the craft' deserve such praise when their entire careers depend on the refinement of the art that someone else creates. Sure they take a diamond in the rough and process it to the point where it can be sold and marketted, but without the rough diamond, their job would not even exist.
Not all artists are your Britney Spears archetype and a great many people (myself included) derive a very big portion of their existential meaning out of music and the effect it has on their life. Talented singers are not interchangable as you claim (have you ever actually watched American Idol?) and even if they were, singing is not the only value added to the art by them. They are our cultural focal points and deal with more stress in a year than you will likely deal with in a lifetime.
Maybe you don't care for what music adds to society, but for many people, art is what makes life worth living.
You need to think bigger. Auction off mod-ups when you have points :P
$1 for an insightful rating on my post? SOLD!
Maybe I will.
Maybe I'm just putting the idea out in a place where other people can read it, so they can join me. Perhaps that is a better use of my time, to put together a following so more people than just me can attack the problem.
Fine, I agree with the civil-liberties nazis claiming that he can't be forced to go in for testing. But I also think that people should use every legal means necessary to coerce him to do so. Just because it is illegal to arrest the guy and drag him to the hospital in handcuffs, doesn't mean that you can't torture him emotionally until he bends to societies will. Write the guy letters, 10 a day, call him on the phone, show up at his house, his work, his family events, make this guy feel like millions of people around the world will spit on him and hate him for the rest of his life until he does what is the utilitarian "right thing" to do.
Fall just short of actually physically making this man do what you want using illegal means, and he will eventually give in.
I have faith in the bickering of nations, this is not going to be a problem for people in general, but is likely to be one for the US. If the US ends up patenting all of the genes in the human body (colleges/private firms/etc.) Europe/China/Whoever will not be likely to pay the US companies for the right to research them and create products based on the genes. All this will mean is that when the best research minds start leaving to work in a country with a more sensible patent structure, the US will just have to scramble to overturn their corrupt, special interest laws.
I'm not saying I'm not dissapointed in the low-lifes we have dictating our patent procedures, but I think the system will correct itself, it will just be a costly lesson.
Honestly, what percentage of computer users play complex 3D games... I don't know, but according to this article, 15% of all games purchased are for the PC, the rest being console games. PCs will still be sold, but as a niche item for the hardcore gamer/media designer/engineers (who will always need mega number crunching power), which would mean that Sun-president-dude is right.
The high end user PCs don't have to have to die to become a relic, you could say that record players are relics, but hardcore audiophiles still buy their media in record form and buy/maintain the players. The point is, web-based services WILL marginalize the PC, and ultimately console games will win out over PC games. Gaming consoles are purpose built devices, and it is very difficult for a multi-purpose swiss army knife of a computer to do a better job than a similar cost console that had every design decision directed towards game performance.
Its not about you getting your 3GB/s gaming link to your low end terminal at home, its about the other 9/10 people getting their 2Mb/s link to surf the web. We PC gamers have been playing on borrowed time, and the false notion that Sally actually needs to buy a 3.8 GHz machine to write that letter to gramma will is in the process of being debunked. Intel/AMD build faster processors because they can make people want them, but I don't think they can do that forever...Enjoy it while it lasts!
You like surfing around the internet without dealing with blockages like the ones that the people in china have to deal with? You like the fact that you work as a Techie in this country and not a middle-manager or a salesman: that your job is one of the few that hasn't been outsourced?
Yes, i'm being over-dramatic, but to demonstrate a point... O'Connor was often the center point in a left/right decision and if she is replaced with a neo-conservative, the loosely defined balance that exists now will dissapear.
If you decide that someone has something valuable to say based only on their method of communication, than you have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and probably for a while. some of the smartest people i know have no care for spelling, punctuation or other such masturbation. its those (yes i know it is it's) that care about the silly details that generally are overcompensating.
If ONLY i had mod points. That was a riot!
Just wanted to let the parent know that he is right, and the grandparent is wrong. Incremental progress is what is needed for success, thats why i voted democrat instead of socialist... Those that say say a solution is useless unless it is 100% effective do more damage than those that stand against the solution entirely.
not oil
Tell this to the kid whose mother is in and out of rehab and has never met his father. Who was born with congenital defects due to his mothers' drug use during pregnancy. Or tell it even to the child whose poor parents weren't able to send him to any school other than the one he's currently at, where answering questions in class gets him beat up, and not joining a gang will seriously stunt his chances at "not being killed". Get a fucking clue.
This is brilliant and should be way higher up in the threading so more people read it.
Well fortunately for the US economy, its not whether we think it sucks, its if everyone else does. And they don't.
You sir, have no perspective other than your own.
KU, you are exactly the reason why evolution should not be swept under the rug in favor of a more religion-friendly scientific agenda. You seem like an incredibly well-educated logically thinking human-being whose only real failing (from the progressive perspective) is lack of knowledge on evolution. If the southern-schools are filled with more of this example of a person, the liberal agenda is easily implemented with exposure to raw facts.
Evolution is like a house of cards, just like all science. From the beginning of the theory to present, each new fossil record and ingenious analysis thereof has added another card to the house. If someone were to find a ill-fitting card and put it on the house and caused it to collapse, it would join the ranks of the many other discarded scientific theories. If the truth is what you seek, find that card, don't attack the scientific method of discovery in general!
It is impossible to understand Judaism-Christianity, without understanding their pagan, egyptian mythology, and nature-worshipping foundation.
You don't see many southern baptist ministers delving into that rabbit hole.
I appreciate the perspective, but i disagree.
The population will not reach 15 billion. Go to google, and search for world population growth. The experts agree on a rough number of 9 billion being the peak of a growth in population. It seems that worldwide population growth rate has been declining from the earlier worrisome numbers (that created the 15 billion dollar figure) and is now at around 1.2% and falling rapidly. It seems that the explosion was due to women having traditional numbers of children, expecting a high mortality rate, but due to our increased medical knowledge, infant mortality has dropped. The birth rate has now declined in tandem, which is why rates are on the way down.
Heat from my laptop? I'm sorry i don't see where this is going... My aparment has a hot-water heater that generates more heat in an hour than my laptop does in 2 weeks.
To be honest, i don't know about the problems in the gulf of mexico, but certainly don't assume that humanity is going to use petroleum for our extended future, it seems there are many more techs being developed (fusion, etc) that will support our needs.
I think that the utopian communism is not just possible while freedom and choice exist, it is inevitable. We are witnessing the beginning of it on the open-source front.
What is the major problem with communism as a principle? The idea that if we all work at our jobs, everyone can feed from the social trough. Each according to their need, each giving according to their talents. What is the problem with this system? What if my talent is cleaning up pig-manure, and your talent is being a rockstar? The problem with communism is i don't want to clean up shit, and most other people don't either. Doing things for the good of society will motivate even good-natured people to work only 'so' hard.
Why are we at the forefront of the *real* communism? Because we as programmers exist in a virtual world where distribution is *free*. If I create something in the digital world, there is no production cost to distribute it. Sure, i'm not going to work very hard at creating it, i do have to eat, and open source doesn't pay the bills; but I don't write software just because i have a deep-seated communist star trek upbringing (which I do) I write it because i want to. I write it because i'm creative, and some people paint, some people write poetry, i make software. This is the core behind utopian communism. It is not a sacrifice for me to do something I love, so my investment in the good of society is minimal. If the software i create makes other people happy, than great, they can use it too, but i'm going to write it either way.
As we progress technically, we find that we are more productive in the work we do. The amount of human labor that needs to be invested in a job is decreasing all the time. If the trends continue, it is not impossible to see an eventual ad-hoc communism, like the one that has arisen in the world of the computer. If communism arises out of society, it will be a natural progression, not a forced one. If it takes one person to run a farm that can produce food for 1000 people, with no additional costs, giving the food away will be as mindless a decision as putting your software on the web for all to use.
Or maybe i'm wrong and you can tell me why.