Children are growing up with tablets now. By the time they get to school they will have become so used to simplistic touchscreen interfaces that teachers might find it challenging to turn their minds to the internals of the computers they use. Philip J. Guo's The Two Cultures of Computing essay (posted to Reddit under the amusing title "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?") is obviously the result of clumsy and unprepared teachers, but even better-trained educators might face the same challenge.
I wonder if teaching CS basics might not be better with pen-and-paper exercises in the beginning, where students are less likely to compare what they are doing to the interfaces they are used to. I loved working with Friedman's The Little Schemer, which I discovered well into adulthood, that teaches one the Lisp philosophy of recursion without every needing to sit in front of a computer. Perhaps children would like such an approach as well, and then by the time you present them with e.g. an actual command line they've already internalized that kind of thinking.
Geez, give them a chance. Google didn't really start on self-driving cars until 2010. That's only four years ago. Lots of new technologies have sat around in corporate research labs for much longer before they went on to be a part of our everyday lives.
You can't have grasslands without ruminants. Try that in most areas of the world and you end up with desert.
Could you cite this, please? A broad swath of Eurasia consists of steppe where neither cattle nor sheep graze (there is of course livestock raising, but it takes place only over a miniscule part of this region).
Besides, it's not like we have a food shortage, the problem is distribution.
Raising livestock takes more water than growing plants, and water is certainly something one would like to conserve. Furthermore, livestock effluence (animal shit) tends to find its way into rivers and streams.
Animal welfare isn't the other ethical issue involved here. I see nothing objectionable in slaughtering an animal and eating it, but doing it on a mass scale presents a risk to the environment that has convinced me to limit my meat intake.
Unless you're talking about petty criminals who don't have the resources to use a secondary phone that is not tied to them.
Already in many countries around the world one cannot buy a SIM card without presenting ID, which goes into some kind of government registry. If this is not already the case in the US, then I imagine it will be in future. Furthermore, didn't one of the Snowden revelations concern the NSA being able to easily track people across "burner phones"?
Look, not to be rude, but as a male couchsurfer who signed up for the network in January 2006 (so well before the crash), who surfed a couple of hundred couches worldwide, who hosted a couple of hundred people, and was very involved in the debate over the site's direction, I probably have more experience than you. (Though after the ramifications of Casey selling the site out became felt, I left for another hospex community around 18 months ago.)
Of course a male who sends out many requests is likely to find at least one male host who is interested simply in sharing, but he is also likely to get refusals from hosts who are looking for something else. That has always been a problem in certain countries, but became increasingly visible across the board as the years went by. If you deny that, I can only imagine that you don't read the CS groups and have not read the experiences of female travellers in their blogs, or talked to male nomadic ambassadors.
The people who seem to have a difficulty using the system are those who don't understand that couchsurfing, while free, isn't free.
My post had nothing to do with CS etiquette (one cannot be a polite guest to a host until one has actually received a positive request to a well-written request), so I don't understand why you are even bringing this up.
HospitalityClub has been moribund for a good six years now. The founder no longer develops the site, it is overrun with spammers and dead profiles.
Couchsurfing was run by a collective of friends that once sought non-profit status, but when they realized that meant giving up control, the founder sold the company to a venture capitalist firm who is now looking at ways to monetize it, so it might not stay free for long. One of its competitors who went the same route ultimately became an apartment rentals service. Plus, it has been a problem for years that many active hosts on CS are interested only in sharing sex -- you get a positive reply to your request only if you are an attractive young female travelling alone.
There are hospitality exchange communities that are really based on an idealism that opening one's home to travelers at no cost and intercultural exchange are good, but HC and CS are no longer good examples.
Rational people support Russians becoming a part of Russia while they want to start a war over it.
Rational people look at the polling statistics of how many (ethnic) Russians in Ukraine actually want to become a part of Russia. Support for joining Russia has never broke 30% in Eastern Ukraine even with widespread anger and disappointment at the new government.
Even in Crimea, where earlier polling suggests only a slight majority wanted to join Russia (ignore the referendum which was organized quickly to avoid scrutiny, and which was boycotted by many ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars), one state taking territory from another -- as opposed to a reasonable compromise of letting the region become independent -- on the basis of a mere slight majority is hardly fair.
I cannot claim to be much of a Star Wars fanatic and haven't read a Star Wars book in years, but I remember reading Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire along with the rest of the Thrawn Trilogy as a child and wishing that someday that would be adapted for the big screen as future episodes of the film series. Judging from its critical acclaim, I imagine many had the same wish. Strange that Disney would leave that all behind when its storywriting work was already done for it.
Perhaps not enough opportunities for tie-in marketing in existing plot material?
While the "open source as something different than Free Software" debate may have exploded in the 1990s after his death, the fellow was around for the many years of GNU and BSD activity and publicity. Did he have any published views on that?
Apple and Google didn't have the infighting that Nokia did. They could concentrate fully on pushing iOS and Android respectively, but Nokia had people territorial about Symbian and management inefficiently directing resources between different teams.
Anyone interested in how a former giant could collapse so bad would probably enjoy David Cord's The Decline and Fall of Nokia. I flipped through it at our large bookstore in Helsinki and found it gripping enough to purchase there and then. Besides press coverage, Cord bases his account on interviews with former Nokia staffers -- there are a lot of bitter Nokia veterans in the Helsinki veteran who want to get the inside story out. Also, as much as I love my N900, it is sad to see that the writing was on the wall even before that particular device came out.
See, that's exactly why I'd like to acquire one - there's money to be made printing stuff for other people. I wanna be the guy making that money.
Do you think you stand a change against established commercial locations like copy shops, which have already secured real estate in prime locations and built up a customer base? When digital photo printing became a thing, you started to see digital photo printers in drugstores and pre-existing photo stores, not new, specialized shops just for that.
That is all besides the point. Often on Slashdot people claim that prices are high and speeds low in the US because the country has so much rural land to service. However, if one compares a small city in Romania with the affluent suburbs of a US metropolitan area, one finds that the former has better internet than the latter in spite of a similar population density.
For my flat in Romania, I have the choice of only two ISPs, a "duoply". And yet both have offered fiber to your door (200 or 300 megabit, I forget which plan I have) for about 10€/month for about a decade now. I see one company has just rolled out gigabit internet for 15€/month. And there's no throttling involved, you can torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month if you'd like.
So while those who bemoan the high prices and shitty connections of the US often point to monopolies or duopolies, there's got to be more to the story. (And let's not bring up population density there, it suffices to compare my metropolitan areas to your metropolitan areas).
For a site whose readership is widely associated with desktop Linux, I'm surprised to see so much interest in CyanogenMod. I loved my Nokia N900 and plan on buying a Neo900 phone both for the fact that it runs the same Debian-like system as my big computer and for the feeling of privacy (the cellular modem is separated from the rest of the system). I discovered the world of Cyanogen only after the wife bought a Samsung Android phone and wondered about its upgradeability. Compared to my own phone, Cyanogen seemed to have more of a Windows aesthetic, roughly comparable to getting one's apps from cnet or other dodgy download sites, instead of the more careful, technically detailed packaging, forums and bug reporting systems one finds from desktop Linux distros.
But ironically it is YOU that is suggesting that YOUR lifestyle is a model for how to build a society.
I made no such suggestion.
But we can build a society around someone that has children. Its a core requirement for a stable society.
I don't know if you've noticed or not, but birthrates are falling across the developed world. And unless you have been leaving under a rock and not considered the very real possibility of resource exhaustion, a significant subset of the population not reproducing may well be a source of stability. I do not make that claim, but I acknowledge that it its and must be evaluated.
Your dig at the bourgeoise Americans with their notions of good paying jobs, a family, a home, and etc is just your own prejudice.
I made no dig. I noted that such a lifestyle is not for everyone, whereas the OP failed to account for the wide variety of views found among the population as to what a desirable career is. You too make demands that citizens be "productive" according to the criteria you set.
What you're telling me is that you're from a non-productive minority...
Go look at the quality-of-living indices, and the countries which dominate them.
Those indices are usually based on life for the average local, not expats making much more money.
If you have a medical emergency in a mountain town in Morocco, you're probably not going to survive.
By that logic people from Europe or North America should just stay home all the time, because you might get dangerously ill in a remote area while on holiday and die, right? Really, if one fell ill in the particular town in Morocco that I was thinking of, you can be in a plush hospital that caters to expats within a two-hour drive. That's less time than in many rural places in large first world countries.
And besides, for young people, medical care is a much less pressing concern, so one can enjoy travel for many years. Note, however, that even old people are increasingly retiring to Southeast Asia because they find its healthcare (at least for those bringing first-world pensions) sufficient.
You might think that, but you can observe people watching television shows or movies on their smartphones in any commuter transport in the developed world. Apparently it doesn't bother millions of people.
Telecommuting also implies that you can do your own job offshore, in another part of the world with lower cost of living. There are a lot of companies who would be quick to hire someone who demands a somewhat lower salary because he has relocated to e.g. a beach in Southeast Asia or a mountain town in Morocco, but is from the same cultural background as the people at the firm and speaks the same language. I know, I work like that.
Now, if a pilot starts out in the military (where they don't have to pay for flight school)
Unless things have changed since I was in, only officers* fly in the military, and in order to be an officer, you need a university degree. That means taking on student debt and being tied down for at least the length of a commission, so if you just want to fly for a living, it would make more sense to just go straight to flight school instead of considering the military a path to riches.
(* Or warrant officers, but that also requires considerable experience behind you as an enlisted man. You don't just start off flying.)
Slashdot Mirror
Children are growing up with tablets now. By the time they get to school they will have become so used to simplistic touchscreen interfaces that teachers might find it challenging to turn their minds to the internals of the computers they use. Philip J. Guo's The Two Cultures of Computing essay (posted to Reddit under the amusing title "How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down on UNIX After They've Seen Spotify?") is obviously the result of clumsy and unprepared teachers, but even better-trained educators might face the same challenge.
I wonder if teaching CS basics might not be better with pen-and-paper exercises in the beginning, where students are less likely to compare what they are doing to the interfaces they are used to. I loved working with Friedman's The Little Schemer , which I discovered well into adulthood, that teaches one the Lisp philosophy of recursion without every needing to sit in front of a computer. Perhaps children would like such an approach as well, and then by the time you present them with e.g. an actual command line they've already internalized that kind of thinking.
Geez, give them a chance. Google didn't really start on self-driving cars until 2010. That's only four years ago. Lots of new technologies have sat around in corporate research labs for much longer before they went on to be a part of our everyday lives.
Could you cite this, please? A broad swath of Eurasia consists of steppe where neither cattle nor sheep graze (there is of course livestock raising, but it takes place only over a miniscule part of this region).
That should read "Animal welfare isn't the only ethical issue", sorry.
Raising livestock takes more water than growing plants, and water is certainly something one would like to conserve. Furthermore, livestock effluence (animal shit) tends to find its way into rivers and streams.
Animal welfare isn't the other ethical issue involved here. I see nothing objectionable in slaughtering an animal and eating it, but doing it on a mass scale presents a risk to the environment that has convinced me to limit my meat intake.
I take it you were inspired by this classic Saturday Night Live sketch?
Already in many countries around the world one cannot buy a SIM card without presenting ID, which goes into some kind of government registry. If this is not already the case in the US, then I imagine it will be in future. Furthermore, didn't one of the Snowden revelations concern the NSA being able to easily track people across "burner phones"?
That should read "one cannot be a polite guest to a host until one has actually received a positive response to a well-written request", sorry.
Look, not to be rude, but as a male couchsurfer who signed up for the network in January 2006 (so well before the crash), who surfed a couple of hundred couches worldwide, who hosted a couple of hundred people, and was very involved in the debate over the site's direction, I probably have more experience than you. (Though after the ramifications of Casey selling the site out became felt, I left for another hospex community around 18 months ago.)
Of course a male who sends out many requests is likely to find at least one male host who is interested simply in sharing, but he is also likely to get refusals from hosts who are looking for something else. That has always been a problem in certain countries, but became increasingly visible across the board as the years went by. If you deny that, I can only imagine that you don't read the CS groups and have not read the experiences of female travellers in their blogs, or talked to male nomadic ambassadors.
My post had nothing to do with CS etiquette (one cannot be a polite guest to a host until one has actually received a positive request to a well-written request), so I don't understand why you are even bringing this up.
HospitalityClub has been moribund for a good six years now. The founder no longer develops the site, it is overrun with spammers and dead profiles.
Couchsurfing was run by a collective of friends that once sought non-profit status, but when they realized that meant giving up control, the founder sold the company to a venture capitalist firm who is now looking at ways to monetize it, so it might not stay free for long. One of its competitors who went the same route ultimately became an apartment rentals service. Plus, it has been a problem for years that many active hosts on CS are interested only in sharing sex -- you get a positive reply to your request only if you are an attractive young female travelling alone.
There are hospitality exchange communities that are really based on an idealism that opening one's home to travelers at no cost and intercultural exchange are good, but HC and CS are no longer good examples.
Rational people look at the polling statistics of how many (ethnic) Russians in Ukraine actually want to become a part of Russia. Support for joining Russia has never broke 30% in Eastern Ukraine even with widespread anger and disappointment at the new government.
Even in Crimea, where earlier polling suggests only a slight majority wanted to join Russia (ignore the referendum which was organized quickly to avoid scrutiny, and which was boycotted by many ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars), one state taking territory from another -- as opposed to a reasonable compromise of letting the region become independent -- on the basis of a mere slight majority is hardly fair.
I cannot claim to be much of a Star Wars fanatic and haven't read a Star Wars book in years, but I remember reading Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire along with the rest of the Thrawn Trilogy as a child and wishing that someday that would be adapted for the big screen as future episodes of the film series. Judging from its critical acclaim, I imagine many had the same wish. Strange that Disney would leave that all behind when its storywriting work was already done for it.
Perhaps not enough opportunities for tie-in marketing in existing plot material?
While the "open source as something different than Free Software" debate may have exploded in the 1990s after his death, the fellow was around for the many years of GNU and BSD activity and publicity. Did he have any published views on that?
Apple and Google didn't have the infighting that Nokia did. They could concentrate fully on pushing iOS and Android respectively, but Nokia had people territorial about Symbian and management inefficiently directing resources between different teams.
Typo for "many Nokia veterans in the Helsinki area".
Anyone interested in how a former giant could collapse so bad would probably enjoy David Cord's The Decline and Fall of Nokia . I flipped through it at our large bookstore in Helsinki and found it gripping enough to purchase there and then. Besides press coverage, Cord bases his account on interviews with former Nokia staffers -- there are a lot of bitter Nokia veterans in the Helsinki veteran who want to get the inside story out. Also, as much as I love my N900, it is sad to see that the writing was on the wall even before that particular device came out.
Do you think you stand a change against established commercial locations like copy shops, which have already secured real estate in prime locations and built up a customer base? When digital photo printing became a thing, you started to see digital photo printers in drugstores and pre-existing photo stores, not new, specialized shops just for that.
That is all besides the point. Often on Slashdot people claim that prices are high and speeds low in the US because the country has so much rural land to service. However, if one compares a small city in Romania with the affluent suburbs of a US metropolitan area, one finds that the former has better internet than the latter in spite of a similar population density.
For my flat in Romania, I have the choice of only two ISPs, a "duoply". And yet both have offered fiber to your door (200 or 300 megabit, I forget which plan I have) for about 10€/month for about a decade now. I see one company has just rolled out gigabit internet for 15€/month. And there's no throttling involved, you can torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month if you'd like.
So while those who bemoan the high prices and shitty connections of the US often point to monopolies or duopolies, there's got to be more to the story. (And let's not bring up population density there, it suffices to compare my metropolitan areas to your metropolitan areas).
For a site whose readership is widely associated with desktop Linux, I'm surprised to see so much interest in CyanogenMod. I loved my Nokia N900 and plan on buying a Neo900 phone both for the fact that it runs the same Debian-like system as my big computer and for the feeling of privacy (the cellular modem is separated from the rest of the system). I discovered the world of Cyanogen only after the wife bought a Samsung Android phone and wondered about its upgradeability. Compared to my own phone, Cyanogen seemed to have more of a Windows aesthetic, roughly comparable to getting one's apps from cnet or other dodgy download sites, instead of the more careful, technically detailed packaging, forums and bug reporting systems one finds from desktop Linux distros.
I made no such suggestion.
I don't know if you've noticed or not, but birthrates are falling across the developed world. And unless you have been leaving under a rock and not considered the very real possibility of resource exhaustion, a significant subset of the population not reproducing may well be a source of stability. I do not make that claim, but I acknowledge that it its and must be evaluated.
I made no dig. I noted that such a lifestyle is not for everyone, whereas the OP failed to account for the wide variety of views found among the population as to what a desirable career is. You too make demands that citizens be "productive" according to the criteria you set.
What the hell are you, Quiverfull?
Those indices are usually based on life for the average local, not expats making much more money.
By that logic people from Europe or North America should just stay home all the time, because you might get dangerously ill in a remote area while on holiday and die, right? Really, if one fell ill in the particular town in Morocco that I was thinking of, you can be in a plush hospital that caters to expats within a two-hour drive. That's less time than in many rural places in large first world countries.
And besides, for young people, medical care is a much less pressing concern, so one can enjoy travel for many years. Note, however, that even old people are increasingly retiring to Southeast Asia because they find its healthcare (at least for those bringing first-world pensions) sufficient.
You might think that, but you can observe people watching television shows or movies on their smartphones in any commuter transport in the developed world. Apparently it doesn't bother millions of people.
Telecommuting also implies that you can do your own job offshore, in another part of the world with lower cost of living. There are a lot of companies who would be quick to hire someone who demands a somewhat lower salary because he has relocated to e.g. a beach in Southeast Asia or a mountain town in Morocco, but is from the same cultural background as the people at the firm and speaks the same language. I know, I work like that.
Unless things have changed since I was in, only officers* fly in the military, and in order to be an officer, you need a university degree. That means taking on student debt and being tied down for at least the length of a commission, so if you just want to fly for a living, it would make more sense to just go straight to flight school instead of considering the military a path to riches.
(* Or warrant officers, but that also requires considerable experience behind you as an enlisted man. You don't just start off flying.)