Good call. I always suspected it was heavily ironic at least, and the several dozen uses I've seen around were probably all virally-syndicated from the same rumour mill...
Still a great line, and maybe I'll get to see Marcus live one of these days. He seems to play Birmingham a fair bit.
"Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music..."
...and I bet he never forsaw the live-action roleplay version either!
> You don't know how something works unless you can explain it to a five-year-old.
It's tricky enough to help kids learn for themselves over the course of years a lot of things (yes, help them learn... teaching isn't just instruction. It's mostly stimulating curiosity, something a lot of people don't have for technology. They just want it to do what they want, not what they do..)
You may think that by 'dumbing-down' the tech speak that a user (or kid) understands what you're talking about, but a lot of vocabulary carries other information as a prerequisite. I'm just as much in favour of fobbing people off with the 'five-year-old' answers ("RAM is thinking space for the computer, sir") but understanding through metaphors can itself be problematic... can actually impede the ability of people to connect together information. As Einstein said: simplify, but don't oversimplify.
Many user comments do actually make sense... they've just missed a link in the semantic chain. Hard drive space is a form of memory. RAM does often help a system perform operations faster. Often, the reason is the propagation of imprecise and functionally useless (or misleading) metaphors.
Oh well, so much for moderating this discussion...
...for the simple reason there's enough of it to catch everyone. And that's something really damaging; the expectation and assumption that everyone flouts certain laws on a regular basis.
The argument that it doesn't matter if certain laws are passed (because they'll only be applied to some offenders) is also fallacious; overly-broad legislature provides an license for bullying and intimidation.
...Joe Sixpack may well hold this irrational consideration, and it may therefore affect Google's bottom line if they lose him (and the similarly prejudiced) as a consequence. Google will have to tread very carefully with the the ad categories it spins off from personal mail content.
Doesn't excuse the phrasing in the article, though.
Fucking hell, you could at least try for originality... and the same with the textbook "us and them" spiel.
I've used, and will continue to use, any format I come across which has content I want to listen to in... and then transcode it for use on a cheap, disposable MP3 player. There are better formats... and hundreds of millions of functioning pieces of hardware ready to receive MP3.
If people actually cared about audio fidelity, they'd insist on media capable of higher quality reproduction than compact discs, and playback equipment to honour it. Most don't. Nor do they pay for their encoders... that genie is long since out of its bottle. Lossy formats enjoy a popularity at least in part because "good enough" continues to be the byword.
Of the three systems I've sorted out in the last few days, all had some form of infestation. The two with Windows 2000 were worst affected, with spyware auto-inserting itself through browser exploits. The much older Win98 SE machine wasn't infested with anything nearly as nasty, most of it due to user error.
Whilst out-of-the-box, Windows 2000 is a fairly stable OS, it's frighteningly insecure.
I've never even heard of Theora. I have a few Ogg audio files, and nothing in run-of-the-mill AAC format. 40 got me a basic MP3 player and 128Mb of compact flash to put in it. And I'm probably ahead of the majority of users out there in that I don't encode fixed bitrate audio.
So, it's nice that there are decent free beer formats out there (if I create content myself I may well use them) but I'm not going to maintain two content libraries in order to have music on the move. Nor are most people.
It would be more accurate to say: who knows what the Ogg is? And how many of the people who do actively use it? Most people only care about MPEG.
> If your web site doesn't work in Lynx, your web site is thoroughly, thoroughly fucked.
I don't think most online banking systems consider themselves fucked. Sure, they offer phone services, so it isn't a direct comparison. But the fact remains that a lot of commercial sites don't work usefully with Lynx, and it has an immeasurably small impact on their popularity.
He's mistaking his indictment (and that of a few regulations in certain geographical territories which most sites don't comply with) for being fucked. I have no idea who the guy is. 'Google', on the other hand, is a verb amongst the general public. It's going to take a seriously unusable system to turn people against Google.
They do provide Usenet archives and cached pages from some sites. I would think that their actual algorithms would fall under their user agreement as a service, though.
Do we have an examples of 'twisted' information (relevant to this case, that is)?
My ex-girlfriend's mother died slowly and painfully over about ten years, starting when my ex- was in primary school. She's currently studying for a Masters degree. The parents of a large number of the people I went to university with are divorced; others have parents they haven't seen in years or who are in different countries.
It's part finding some sort of support from somewhere, even if it's yourself, and part bloody-minded determination.
I have little time for faceless institutions myself, particularly religious ones... but I'm not prepared to make the blanket statement that there aren't some good individuals in any of them. I consider myself fortunate to have met a few.
Incidentally, since you also seem to be familiar with Douglas Coupland's Generation X, might I recommend a later work of his: Microserfs. Particularly the last chapter. Because friends are as much family as family, and friends we can choose.
...fairly sure I recall reading it in one of these. Possibly in one of Shatner's own books? I realise the Pocket Books fiction isn't strictly canonical... but then, as others have noted, the term TOS is a retcon.
Since my favourite part of Star Trek (Peter David's New Frontier series) is only available in novel form, it's good enough for me...:)
you're tellin me that if kids who are bored with the school system applied themsleves and made themselves more bored, they'd be more successful?
No, you're adding in words to facilitate the rant you had stored up. But that's fine... though you'd possibly be surprised how much I agree with some of the points you raise, particularly concerning reading. (Which I almost give up on by the age of eight because of the disinteresting schemes we were fed.) You can't teach someone to read, but you can help them learn. A few basic letter and word to sound reminders, then it's just practise and friendly correction; stuff our parents did with us instinctively from a young age.
First an on-topic response, then I'll move onto other points. If I'd had my choice at school, I wouldn't have studied a foreign language, let alone both French and German. To make it interesting, we turned any roleplay or essay task we were given into comic relief. The teachers I had were wise enough to realise that this was a form of self-motivation; we expanded our vocabulary and picked up some grammar whilst doing the bare minimum to fulfil the stated task. Anyway, both of those languages have been very useful to me... not simply in terms of opening doors to other studies (medieval English borrows heavily from European traditions) but in situations: there are more news sources I can read, and being able to string a simple sentence together when travelling makes both me and people I encounter more comfortable.
It's been a similar situation with other subjects; history learnt at primary school fed into history I studied later... all of it contextual knowledge. I may not have appreciated it at the time (although on the whole I did have pretty good teachers who tried their best to keep us engaged) but I've certainly been grateful for it since. I'm lousy at many areas of math, but basic algebra skills and not having to reach for a calculator all of the time (thanks to a certain amount of rote memorisation) give me a handle on anything I want or need to do. There's no way in hell you would have convinced me as a teenager that this stuff was of use, or to be concerned about the future. Now that I'm here, I'm quite glad for the gentle persistence of others.
Again, in these cases, we kept lessons fun... mostly by doing the work in the shortest possible time and using the rest to entertain ourselves. As long as you're not holding someone else back and give tasks a reasonable shot, most teachers could care less about this attitude. I've always understood on some level that, as far as the person 'in charge' is concerned, a classroom is an unfortunate but necessary balance between helping us grasp things at our own rate and having to keep tabs on where thirty-five precocious darlings in front of them are at. My open invitation to anyone who thinks that straightforward is to try it for yourself... there's only one thing to bear in mind: be ready to justify your choices and adapt if a strategy appears to be failing, because none of those kids will have that time again.
You seem to have taken the tack that I'm attempting to pass the buck where teaching is of a poor standard, as well as responding particularly to a US style setup in which students don't advance a grade unless they jump through a specific set of hoops. Well, firstly, there's far greater emphasis on differentiated learning strategies in the UK, due to fixed progression from ages 7-16. Where it requires a different curriculum emphasis, that's provided as much as resources allow. It won't always work, but no system making one person responsible for two or three dozen others is perfect. Learning is a two-way process, not filling a bucket, as Yeats observed and you yourself echoed in the flame metaphor.
There's no telling what a pissed teenager who knows what you're upto can do, especially if they are smarter than you are and are well and truely, thoroughly pissed.
Fortunately we have less ready access to firearms, and I'm not particularly chicken-
I wouldn't consider myself particularly old, adult or mature at 22. Or tidy, for that matter...
Anyway, the point is simply that it can be very difficult to break into a subject without a basic grounding in it. I think I understand what you're saying: we tend to gravitate towards things we can understand intuitively.
But we do have choices; I studied maths past the point I probably should have have dropped it, because I felt it was a useful tool. I certainly didn't study modern history because I was good at it. If we allow ourselves to stick too closely to areas we have a more intuitive grasp of, our ability to adapt can suffer. We also won't get surprised nearly enough.
some percentage of Slashdotters would understand that a child who isn't challenged by schoolwork could turn into an outcast of some sort
Certainly true of some students in schools I've taught in. Many intelligent students adopt the time-honoured creed of "if you're truly smart, the smartest thing you can do is not to let them know how smart you are" as a coping device.
I certainly couldn't envisage sitting through the tedium of school again from a student's point of view... and yet, equally, there are a lot of students who fail to realise that studying a little chemistry or maths now gives them the base to take it further should they choose to later in their educational careers. So, ultimately, my advice would be to stick with it... make an effort to find something enjoyable or worthwhile about every task you're set whilst in education, especially if it involves opportunity to gently subvert the task; more teachers have a sense of humour about such things than you might think.
...I predict it'll take, what, three years for the giant intelligent rats to take all of the good jobs? To say nothing of the modifications which will have to be made to accomodate them at the Superbowl.
No, seriously, this does raise interesting issues such as how such a wonder supplement would be rationed to a population; how its absence would hold back the third world even further, and whether the first generation of hyper-intelligent kids would face discrimination at all levels of society.
I'm not sure where you are geographically, but in the UK an 'arrestable offence' can in some cases be down to the judgement call of an officer. For example, carrying a baseball bat in the trunk of your car would be viewed differently if they could prove intent to use as a weapon... if you have a catching glove and a baseball in there as well, and a baseball club card in your wallet, you aren't going to be looked at in askance unless the bat is blood-stained or you've been seen threatening someone with it.
I think the ruling on knife blades over here mainly extends to "no flick-knives, blades must 3" or under"...
Often stupidly and ineffectively (you can't do any damange with toenail clippers that you can't do with your teeth), but they have good reason to be paranoid of tiny potential weapons.
They aren't going to show, say, an audio CD which can be snapped in two and used to slash someone's throat. Or any number of razor-edged plastic tools available on sale or which can be legitimately carried and 'converted' on a whim.
Unless they're planning a move to strip and cavity search everyone boarding planes, I'd suggest it makes more sense to run checks for guns and explosives, then make sure there's someone on the plane capable of dealing with anyone who finds themselves a sharp edge to threaten people with. There's too many ways to get one which don't involve metal or boarding the plane with it in that form.
...this will bring data-mining to the English curriculum? I know for a fact that part of one of my university grades was a result of nothing more complicated than searching the text of Heart of Darkness for gendered pronouns.
A particularly welcome use of technology, although as a budding English teacher I may be somewhat biased...;)
The point about legal carrying of sharp edges raises another interesting point. I mean, have you ever tried stabbing anything with most penknives? You'd have more joy sticking a biro through someone's chest. (Yes, I realise there are some very high-quality penknives out there too.) Yet there's no attempt by many law-enforcement agencies to differentiate between a useful basic tool and a dedicated weapon. Rather similar to the data/MP3/filesharing situation.
As if there weren't already enough evidence...
on
Pop Up Ads in Space
·
· Score: 5, Funny
...that Matt Groening was a prophet. *shakes head sadly*
I wonder to what extent the patent is attributable to the numerous examples of this kind of behaviour in traditional science-fiction and popular media such as Futurama?
Slashdot Mirror
Still a great line, and maybe I'll get to see Marcus live one of these days. He seems to play Birmingham a fair bit.
"Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music..."
...and I bet he never forsaw the live-action roleplay version either!
It's tricky enough to help kids learn for themselves over the course of years a lot of things (yes, help them learn... teaching isn't just instruction. It's mostly stimulating curiosity, something a lot of people don't have for technology. They just want it to do what they want, not what they do..)
You may think that by 'dumbing-down' the tech speak that a user (or kid) understands what you're talking about, but a lot of vocabulary carries other information as a prerequisite. I'm just as much in favour of fobbing people off with the 'five-year-old' answers ("RAM is thinking space for the computer, sir") but understanding through metaphors can itself be problematic... can actually impede the ability of people to connect together information. As Einstein said: simplify, but don't oversimplify.
Many user comments do actually make sense... they've just missed a link in the semantic chain. Hard drive space is a form of memory. RAM does often help a system perform operations faster. Often, the reason is the propagation of imprecise and functionally useless (or misleading) metaphors.
Oh well, so much for moderating this discussion...
The argument that it doesn't matter if certain laws are passed (because they'll only be applied to some offenders) is also fallacious; overly-broad legislature provides an license for bullying and intimidation.
No stereotypes required...
Doesn't excuse the phrasing in the article, though.
Fucking hell, you could at least try for originality... and the same with the textbook "us and them" spiel.
I've used, and will continue to use, any format I come across which has content I want to listen to in... and then transcode it for use on a cheap, disposable MP3 player. There are better formats... and hundreds of millions of functioning pieces of hardware ready to receive MP3.
If people actually cared about audio fidelity, they'd insist on media capable of higher quality reproduction than compact discs, and playback equipment to honour it. Most don't. Nor do they pay for their encoders... that genie is long since out of its bottle. Lossy formats enjoy a popularity at least in part because "good enough" continues to be the byword.
Whilst out-of-the-box, Windows 2000 is a fairly stable OS, it's frighteningly insecure.
Real have already hurt websites which provide content in their format. I'm seeing a lot more sites provide material in multiple formats these days.
Publicity. That's really all there is to it. Gets the company seen.
So, it's nice that there are decent free beer formats out there (if I create content myself I may well use them) but I'm not going to maintain two content libraries in order to have music on the move. Nor are most people.
It would be more accurate to say: who knows what the Ogg is? And how many of the people who do actively use it? Most people only care about MPEG.
I don't think most online banking systems consider themselves fucked. Sure, they offer phone services, so it isn't a direct comparison. But the fact remains that a lot of commercial sites don't work usefully with Lynx, and it has an immeasurably small impact on their popularity.
He's mistaking his indictment (and that of a few regulations in certain geographical territories which most sites don't comply with) for being fucked. I have no idea who the guy is. 'Google', on the other hand, is a verb amongst the general public. It's going to take a seriously unusable system to turn people against Google.
Oh, there is. It's just very difficult to pronounce unless you happen to be in the act of vomiting at the time...
Do we have an examples of 'twisted' information (relevant to this case, that is)?
...one doesn't mean you've never been infected.
My ex-girlfriend's mother died slowly and painfully over about ten years, starting when my ex- was in primary school. She's currently studying for a Masters degree. The parents of a large number of the people I went to university with are divorced; others have parents they haven't seen in years or who are in different countries.
It's part finding some sort of support from somewhere, even if it's yourself, and part bloody-minded determination.
I have little time for faceless institutions myself, particularly religious ones... but I'm not prepared to make the blanket statement that there aren't some good individuals in any of them. I consider myself fortunate to have met a few.
Incidentally, since you also seem to be familiar with Douglas Coupland's Generation X, might I recommend a later work of his: Microserfs. Particularly the last chapter. Because friends are as much family as family, and friends we can choose.
Since my favourite part of Star Trek (Peter David's New Frontier series) is only available in novel form, it's good enough for me... :)
No, you're adding in words to facilitate the rant you had stored up. But that's fine... though you'd possibly be surprised how much I agree with some of the points you raise, particularly concerning reading. (Which I almost give up on by the age of eight because of the disinteresting schemes we were fed.) You can't teach someone to read, but you can help them learn. A few basic letter and word to sound reminders, then it's just practise and friendly correction; stuff our parents did with us instinctively from a young age.
First an on-topic response, then I'll move onto other points. If I'd had my choice at school, I wouldn't have studied a foreign language, let alone both French and German. To make it interesting, we turned any roleplay or essay task we were given into comic relief. The teachers I had were wise enough to realise that this was a form of self-motivation; we expanded our vocabulary and picked up some grammar whilst doing the bare minimum to fulfil the stated task. Anyway, both of those languages have been very useful to me... not simply in terms of opening doors to other studies (medieval English borrows heavily from European traditions) but in situations: there are more news sources I can read, and being able to string a simple sentence together when travelling makes both me and people I encounter more comfortable.
It's been a similar situation with other subjects; history learnt at primary school fed into history I studied later... all of it contextual knowledge. I may not have appreciated it at the time (although on the whole I did have pretty good teachers who tried their best to keep us engaged) but I've certainly been grateful for it since. I'm lousy at many areas of math, but basic algebra skills and not having to reach for a calculator all of the time (thanks to a certain amount of rote memorisation) give me a handle on anything I want or need to do. There's no way in hell you would have convinced me as a teenager that this stuff was of use, or to be concerned about the future. Now that I'm here, I'm quite glad for the gentle persistence of others.
Again, in these cases, we kept lessons fun... mostly by doing the work in the shortest possible time and using the rest to entertain ourselves. As long as you're not holding someone else back and give tasks a reasonable shot, most teachers could care less about this attitude. I've always understood on some level that, as far as the person 'in charge' is concerned, a classroom is an unfortunate but necessary balance between helping us grasp things at our own rate and having to keep tabs on where thirty-five precocious darlings in front of them are at. My open invitation to anyone who thinks that straightforward is to try it for yourself... there's only one thing to bear in mind: be ready to justify your choices and adapt if a strategy appears to be failing, because none of those kids will have that time again.
You seem to have taken the tack that I'm attempting to pass the buck where teaching is of a poor standard, as well as responding particularly to a US style setup in which students don't advance a grade unless they jump through a specific set of hoops. Well, firstly, there's far greater emphasis on differentiated learning strategies in the UK, due to fixed progression from ages 7-16. Where it requires a different curriculum emphasis, that's provided as much as resources allow. It won't always work, but no system making one person responsible for two or three dozen others is perfect. Learning is a two-way process, not filling a bucket, as Yeats observed and you yourself echoed in the flame metaphor.
There's no telling what a pissed teenager who knows what you're upto can do, especially if they are smarter than you are and are well and truely, thoroughly pissed.
Fortunately we have less ready access to firearms, and I'm not particularly chicken-
Anyway, the point is simply that it can be very difficult to break into a subject without a basic grounding in it. I think I understand what you're saying: we tend to gravitate towards things we can understand intuitively.
But we do have choices; I studied maths past the point I probably should have have dropped it, because I felt it was a useful tool. I certainly didn't study modern history because I was good at it. If we allow ourselves to stick too closely to areas we have a more intuitive grasp of, our ability to adapt can suffer. We also won't get surprised nearly enough.
Certainly true of some students in schools I've taught in. Many intelligent students adopt the time-honoured creed of "if you're truly smart, the smartest thing you can do is not to let them know how smart you are" as a coping device.
I certainly couldn't envisage sitting through the tedium of school again from a student's point of view... and yet, equally, there are a lot of students who fail to realise that studying a little chemistry or maths now gives them the base to take it further should they choose to later in their educational careers. So, ultimately, my advice would be to stick with it... make an effort to find something enjoyable or worthwhile about every task you're set whilst in education, especially if it involves opportunity to gently subvert the task; more teachers have a sense of humour about such things than you might think.
No, seriously, this does raise interesting issues such as how such a wonder supplement would be rationed to a population; how its absence would hold back the third world even further, and whether the first generation of hyper-intelligent kids would face discrimination at all levels of society.
I think the ruling on knife blades over here mainly extends to "no flick-knives, blades must 3" or under"...
They aren't going to show, say, an audio CD which can be snapped in two and used to slash someone's throat. Or any number of razor-edged plastic tools available on sale or which can be legitimately carried and 'converted' on a whim.
Unless they're planning a move to strip and cavity search everyone boarding planes, I'd suggest it makes more sense to run checks for guns and explosives, then make sure there's someone on the plane capable of dealing with anyone who finds themselves a sharp edge to threaten people with. There's too many ways to get one which don't involve metal or boarding the plane with it in that form.
A particularly welcome use of technology, although as a budding English teacher I may be somewhat biased... ;)
The point about legal carrying of sharp edges raises another interesting point. I mean, have you ever tried stabbing anything with most penknives? You'd have more joy sticking a biro through someone's chest. (Yes, I realise there are some very high-quality penknives out there too.) Yet there's no attempt by many law-enforcement agencies to differentiate between a useful basic tool and a dedicated weapon. Rather similar to the data/MP3/filesharing situation.
I wonder to what extent the patent is attributable to the numerous examples of this kind of behaviour in traditional science-fiction and popular media such as Futurama?