Ok, but it seems likely that the Professor of Media Technology at MIT might be more of an authority on computers than on managing a 3rd-grade classroom. I was thinking more of did he solicit requirements from the people who are supposed to benefit from his inventions, or is just he assuming that they will?
I think the GP point isn't that teachers don't need a PC, but that putting a PC in the hands of each and every child is not, as yet, a proven boost to learning... ...The laptop on my desk (my personal laptop) was a positive tool, but introducing those additional PCs to the room was a mixed bag... ...I, too, question the benefit of putting a computer on every desk in a "normal" classroom setting. However, I think that in situations where children are in a mixed environment (one-room schoolhouse) or where children can't get to school regularly, there could be a benefit.
I think you're probably correct. I wonder if Negroponte consulted any educators before embarking on this quest of his--a slightly less ambitious project than one laptop per child--perhaps "one computer with reliable communications per school"--may have been a better starting point, followed later by OLPC.
And this made what difference? No I'm not a teacher, but I was a student when they started bringing computers into the classroom. They did nothing. No one knew how to use them, the teachers didn't know how to teach with them and in the end, because they were such an expense for the school, NO ONE was allowed to touch them. Everyone thought they would be the best thing in the world and the school would start churning out Einstein's, but the novelty wore off pretty soon.
Computers in the schools of developed nations are not some magical silver bullet that makes lazy students A+ students or better students at all, and they won't be some magical force in developing nations either.
Well, as I just pointed out to you, in the hands of a competent instructor, the computers had a beneficial effect, as noted in significantly improved grades per unit time of work put in by that instructor (this was recorded by the Chicago Public Schools after the pilot program completed which had put a computer in Dad's classroom). I would further point out two things to you: One, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," and two, if you are not yourself a teacher, you are probably not qualified to comment on whether or not computers can be used as instructional tools...especially since we are...what? Fifteen or twenty years after schools started getting them? Don't you think it's possible that since then, teachers have gotten a little better at integrating them into the classroom?
Just because you didn't have the kind of magical learning experience you feel entitled to doesn't mean that good teachers can't benefit from having computers in their classrooms. As someone else noted, one laptop per child is probably an unrealistic stretch, but five laptops per school could be a big boost; and again, we're not talking about letting some kid in a war zone play WOW, we're talking about opening up kids in poor countries (think rural India) to more opportunities.
Are you a teacher? My old man just retired after 30 years of teaching in some of Chicago's worst ghettos. It was a huge boost to his classrooms when they got computers, because for instance when it came time to teach the kids math he had a huge repository of free content, lessons, all kinds of stuff that he could just pull down from the web...Mathematica alone was worth the cost of installation and training, in his opinion.
I think Negroponte should think about fixing the fucked-up US education system before he starts screwing with those of other countries.
I've read his bio and there is nothing in there that suggests he is any good at anything but designing computer stuff and sometimes donating money to a cause...what makes you think he should devote any attention to fixing our educational system?
For about the billionth time...the $100 laptop isn't intended to let kids in a war zone check their gmail. It's intended for areas where a little cheap, portable, and durable computing power would go a long way. Think of it not as an attempt to solve the worst problems, but maybe the fifth-worst problem.
That said, I'm not wholly convinced about the new device for the reasons you stated. I run a charity wherein I refurbish castoffs and give them to high school kids in poor neighborhoods--in about a month we're going to have our first charity drive to get money for free broadband (Verizon here is like $14/month) or to buy cheap stuff on eBay.
Though again, there are "worse" problems in the ghetto than high school kids not being able to type up a paper at home, but ending gang violence, drug abuse, and absentee fathers are not really within my reach, dig?
That "the absence of evidence does not equate to evidence of absence" is standard boilerplate when it comes to empiricism. Your comparison to Scientology is inapt because it is impossible to empirically test for the presence of thetans. Or, given another example--the above quote is ridiculous in the context of the WMD search because just about every place had been searched. It was still true--because it is possible that the Iraqis had perfected a cloaking device or something--but extremely unlikely.
However, we CAN test for life on other planets using empirical methods, and we have not NEARLY exhausted all of the places to look in the universe. In addition, if it's theoretically possible for known species to survive on Mars, then searching for an unknown species that does or did at one point live on Mars is reasonable. Ergo, your reasoning is unsound.
If you want to make a criticism based on the amount of money being spent, that's one thing--but when it comes to pure science, the whole "We did some experiments and found no evidence to support the hypothesis, so the hypothesis is wrong, even though observational data backs it up" thing just doesn't fly. Imagine Oppenheimer: "Well, my math says that we can split the atom, so I tried it with a knife, a crowbar, and a turkey sandwich--none of these worked, so I guess it's impossible to split the atom."
The robots act based on specific sensor input. That sensor input is quite tightly bounded and can thus be simulated.
From what I understand modeling sensors is not really that easy, but that could be dependent upon the nature of the sensor. I imagine that simulating a laser rangefinder is easier than, say, an eyeball. Check out the writeup on the AI in Halo sometime--it's not much more advanced than, say, Doom, because actually modeling a bad guy looking at you and deciding to shoot at you is difficult--so there are cheats, hacks, and workarounds so the player has a simulation of a simulation of intelligence (like reading fark.com):)
So, perhaps you are correct. But, speaking from experience, I'd still say it's almost always worthwhile to do a real-world test even for something this simple, just because you almost always find stuff that you didn't think of when you set up the model (or stuff that you could not have thought of, in any meaningful sense, until you see them happening). So, fluid dynamics are pretty well understood, but we still do wind-tunnel tests for a new airframe. Also, if the robots get any more complex than they already are, the computational costs will just get extravagant--a problem with physical models, which is why you have physics problems that begin with "Assume a point-shaped or spherical cow..."
Well...no. It looks like you're just restating the previous point: "The innate behavior of the individuals is known, ergo the group can be modeled as an aggregation of individuals." But we keep finding that this is not the case. The group behavior doesn't emerge out of nowhere, it emerges out of interaction effects that we didn't forsee. Or, in other words, you can't model the interaction effects because they haven't been observed yet; you're not modeling a group, you're modeling a herd of individuals.
Of course you can make an educated guess, which sounds like what you're suggesting, but quite often the reality differs radically from the model, usually from something really innocuous. And then you say "What? That shouldn't matter!" but it does, and then you have to add it to the model:) In military circles you have Boyd's concept of OODA loops--it just doesn't make sense to try to model a platoon as 20 infantrymen. "A half a platoon" doesn't make sense from the standpoint of modeling a platoon, anymore than "half a machine gunner" makes sense when you're modeling the individuals.
Interaction effects result in "emergent" behavior because it's not readily apparent from the behavior of individuals. That is to say, sense-and-respond cycles are not easy to model unless you start out with a lot of data. A good example is ants--single ants wandering around demonstrate chaotic behavior in time and in space, whereas large numbers of ants demonstrate very ordered behavior (purposeful movement, all taking rests at the same time, etc.). We can model this because we've seen it, but before we ever saw it, it would probably have been outside of our abilities to predict that it would happen.
In terms of complexity hierarchy, it doesn't make sense to make a model that is just an aggregation of different objects. You don't talk about the group behavior entirely in terms of the objects making up the group, because the objects don't demonstrate group behavior--the group does--so in some sense "half a herd of robots" doesn't make any sense. From the perspective from which the group behavior is evident, the group is a unitary individual.
Sorry, you have to choose whether it's ok to legislate morality. I'd prefer to avoid it myself, but unfortunately I guess that's just another set of morals, right?
I think that technically the Congress can do little else besides legislate morality. Every law that they put into effect is theoretically a approximation of some kind of objective and universal moral law. If not, then there's nothing to complain about except when "your side" doesn't get to make the laws. If so, then we can debate the laws and whether or not they should exist.
This is what the Framers did, and then came up with a pretty good document, the goal of which was to limit the government for the purpose of providing the most possible freedom to the people, and in many cases it's clear that some new laws violate this document and therefore are probably immoral. However much the Left wants to debate this, though, I think that it is the reliance on relativism ("Living Document" liberals) that has hamstrung their efforts as they tries to fight the changes being put into practice by the current administration.
If the oil companies were smart, they would start up alternative-energy R&D labs of their own and then they wouldn't lose any of that money, really. They'd just be compelled to do the research themselves (which would save them having to buy the patents and then lock them away, which is what they're going to try to do anyway).
I often wonder why people continually make this assumption. There is no evidence for this point of view, at least none that I've seen.
It's an artifact of a certain kind of thinking. Engineers, physicists, IT geeks, most of these are "bottom up" thinkers, which point of view assumes that everything is pretty simple, reductionism ad absurdio is a good idea, etc. But these points of view have difficulty handling interaction effects and forms, hence you have physics textbooks with passages like "Imagine a spherical or point-shaped cow..."
Example, my roommate programmed this simulation of ant behavior. Ants act radically different in groups than they do alone--their behavior forms spatial patterns and also patterns in the time scale. So he reads up on ant behavior and makes this part of the simulation--"See? The complex behavior is part of the ant." But he doesn't seem to want to wrap his brain around the idea that the complex behavior was not observable by one ant alone, so the complex behavior is not just an aggregation of individual behaviors. They acted properly because he made them act properly, but the internal rules that actually govern the behavior are unknown. There may be limits to our cognitive ability to understand the universe, ergo, it will always remain complex--assuming it is not does not mean that it is not...not if you're really a scientist (empiricist) anyway.
'Course, I could be completely full of shit, who knows?
Just an addendum, complexity does not necessarily have anything to do with code length, but more with interactions (Goodwin again). A large organism is not really "explainable" in purely bottom-up terms, not in any intelligible sense anyway. In a top-down fashion you also need to view it as a unit in and of itself.
Actually, the tendency for species is to evolve towards increased complexity; see How the Leopard Changed Its Spots by Brian Goodwin.
If you want to use the evolution metaphor, I supposed GUIs are members of a species with few selection pressures: we purchase whatever is offered, without even bitching a lot. There are some UIs that are so horrible that they die quickly--evolutionary dead ends with their metaphorical organs outside their metaphorical skin. In this scenario variation among organisms has less to do with selection pressures and more to do with random events--ie there was no demand for OSX's dashboard until OSX was released and made the default XP desktop look like something the cat coughed up--so innovation could be analogous to punctuated equilibrium. OSX is successful so we should expect its features to show up in other UIs, like KDE4.
Because the environment is not placing that much pressure on the competing species, you wind up with some features that drastically reduce survivability, some that drastically increase it, and a whole lot of cruft that does neither.
Well, you could do a basic requirements analysis and figure out where the "key points" are, what they are, what could happen if they were degraded or taken offline, and then what you could do to compensate. Basically, the country needs our "cyber" infrastructure in both the short term (disaster response communications) and long term (Wall Street). So you ask yourself what contingency plans we might have if a biological attack occurred at the same time as a power plant failure, or you might look at financial networks and try to figure out what their weaknesses are and correct them, come up with some plans in case they go down, anticipate what will happen to our banking and so forth if they all die. And so forth.
Nah, who am I kidding? He's going to drop a billion dollars on "security" software. So long as Sandra Bullock is around to bail us out, though, I'm not worried.
So do the initial negative results mean that the positive result is false, even though there was currently no known theory??
Not at all! But they do mean that the initial explanation of events lacked sufficient explanatory power and so were discarded in favor of theories that did not. Later on you get a better understanding (e.g. one that includes wind), and you can explain the results you got. You see now that you have a very specific set of data ("If you tie this paper-and-stick apparatus, weighing no more than X ounces, to a string, then wind of sufficient velocity will keep it aloft indefinitely") and a theory that adequately explains the data, whereas before you had a bunch of junk science. It's also important to note that the new theory doesn't contradict the prevailing, VERY STRONG theory (gravity, etc.); it complements it.
Popper would probably explain to you that experimental negation does not prove that cold fusion is impossible, but it does prove that cold fusion does not work as described by the experimenters with their theory and data sets. If you're going to try for a Kuhnian paradigm shift you need a lot more than what we've got.
I'm not sure I follow your point. Mine is that anyone can argue 'til they're blue in the face that windows is somehow empirically "better" or has "more features," but none of that is necessarily germane to the argument because "better" is a term relative to the needs of the user. For a basic home user (in this case, a high school student who wants to send e-mail, browse MySpace, chat on IM, and type up history papers), a distro like Kubuntu is indistinguishable from XP except in one area--the price tag.
If, however, you have a project whose specific requirements are best met by using a windows product, by all means, go for it. Again, the point is that "better" is judged relevant to your needs.
I would, however, give the following anecdotal evidence...at work we have a truly hutongous data warehouse. We do not use a native windows app--we have a gigantic SAS database running on Sun boxes. Most of the users access the data via a web interface--the pages are served from a Linux box that runs Apache. We use Outlook to trade e-mails, IE to grab data, and Word to type up reports. That's the extent to which we are a windows shop. You can go on and on about how Windows > Linux because it has "more features" but once again, are these features germane to my needs? 99% of the time the answer is "no."
One last thing--at home, I have the choice between Firefox and IE. IE has many more features (.net for example) but most of these are nothing more to me than a reason to apply new patches every month. Firefox, on the other hand, has plugins and extensions, written by other users, that I actually find useful. So in my mind, in most cases, open source comes out ahead, because it gets the job done and costs less. I really don't see how any other considerations are important.
I run a nonprofit wherein I refurbish people's castoff computers, install Kubuntu, and then give them away to high school students in my area who can't afford their own computers (we also do fundraisers to pay for their DSL).
There is no way we could afford Windows licenses (we have placed about sixty boxes since January). Kubuntu is free.
To the end-user, who in this case only needs to type papers, send e-mail, and surf the web (ie, the vast majority of users), Kubuntu is a much better deal than XP. There is absolutely no comparison. None of the things you posted up there matter; even if MS Office is a superior product to OpenOffice (which I'll grant), for a basic user, MS Office's advantages are a non-issue, because they only ever use the most basic features (type, spellcheck, put text in italics, maybe insert footnotes, etc.).
I'll also allow that if you want to play games, typically you gotta be running a windows box. But then again, if I want to play new games, there is a hardware buy-in as well as the software buy-in for the XP license--I gotta shell out for the newest 3D card, more RAM, etc. already anyway, so I think gaming is a special case.
I suppose it just comes down to what specific application you're using the box for, eh?
The reason we have those laws in place is because of an assumption on the part of the Founding Fathers that whenever the government is not being completely transparent, then it's up to no good. People in power always need a watchdog.
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Ok, but it seems likely that the Professor of Media Technology at MIT might be more of an authority on computers than on managing a 3rd-grade classroom. I was thinking more of did he solicit requirements from the people who are supposed to benefit from his inventions, or is just he assuming that they will?
I think the GP point isn't that teachers don't need a PC, but that putting a PC in the hands of each and every child is not, as yet, a proven boost to learning...
...The laptop on my desk (my personal laptop) was a positive tool, but introducing those additional PCs to the room was a mixed bag...
...I, too, question the benefit of putting a computer on every desk in a "normal" classroom setting. However, I think that in situations where children are in a mixed environment (one-room schoolhouse) or where children can't get to school regularly, there could be a benefit.
I think you're probably correct. I wonder if Negroponte consulted any educators before embarking on this quest of his--a slightly less ambitious project than one laptop per child--perhaps "one computer with reliable communications per school"--may have been a better starting point, followed later by OLPC.
And this made what difference? No I'm not a teacher, but I was a student when they started bringing computers into the classroom. They did nothing. No one knew how to use them, the teachers didn't know how to teach with them and in the end, because they were such an expense for the school, NO ONE was allowed to touch them. Everyone thought they would be the best thing in the world and the school would start churning out Einstein's, but the novelty wore off pretty soon. Computers in the schools of developed nations are not some magical silver bullet that makes lazy students A+ students or better students at all, and they won't be some magical force in developing nations either.
Well, as I just pointed out to you, in the hands of a competent instructor, the computers had a beneficial effect, as noted in significantly improved grades per unit time of work put in by that instructor (this was recorded by the Chicago Public Schools after the pilot program completed which had put a computer in Dad's classroom). I would further point out two things to you: One, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data," and two, if you are not yourself a teacher, you are probably not qualified to comment on whether or not computers can be used as instructional tools...especially since we are...what? Fifteen or twenty years after schools started getting them? Don't you think it's possible that since then, teachers have gotten a little better at integrating them into the classroom?
Just because you didn't have the kind of magical learning experience you feel entitled to doesn't mean that good teachers can't benefit from having computers in their classrooms. As someone else noted, one laptop per child is probably an unrealistic stretch, but five laptops per school could be a big boost; and again, we're not talking about letting some kid in a war zone play WOW, we're talking about opening up kids in poor countries (think rural India) to more opportunities.
Are you a teacher? My old man just retired after 30 years of teaching in some of Chicago's worst ghettos. It was a huge boost to his classrooms when they got computers, because for instance when it came time to teach the kids math he had a huge repository of free content, lessons, all kinds of stuff that he could just pull down from the web...Mathematica alone was worth the cost of installation and training, in his opinion.
I think Negroponte should think about fixing the fucked-up US education system before he starts screwing with those of other countries. I've read his bio and there is nothing in there that suggests he is any good at anything but designing computer stuff and sometimes donating money to a cause...what makes you think he should devote any attention to fixing our educational system?
For about the billionth time...the $100 laptop isn't intended to let kids in a war zone check their gmail. It's intended for areas where a little cheap, portable, and durable computing power would go a long way. Think of it not as an attempt to solve the worst problems, but maybe the fifth-worst problem.
That said, I'm not wholly convinced about the new device for the reasons you stated. I run a charity wherein I refurbish castoffs and give them to high school kids in poor neighborhoods--in about a month we're going to have our first charity drive to get money for free broadband (Verizon here is like $14/month) or to buy cheap stuff on eBay.
Though again, there are "worse" problems in the ghetto than high school kids not being able to type up a paper at home, but ending gang violence, drug abuse, and absentee fathers are not really within my reach, dig?
I think you might need to examine the definition of "extremeophilic" microbes again. Pay special attention to the use of "extreme" this time.
That "the absence of evidence does not equate to evidence of absence" is standard boilerplate when it comes to empiricism. Your comparison to Scientology is inapt because it is impossible to empirically test for the presence of thetans. Or, given another example--the above quote is ridiculous in the context of the WMD search because just about every place had been searched. It was still true--because it is possible that the Iraqis had perfected a cloaking device or something--but extremely unlikely.
However, we CAN test for life on other planets using empirical methods, and we have not NEARLY exhausted all of the places to look in the universe. In addition, if it's theoretically possible for known species to survive on Mars, then searching for an unknown species that does or did at one point live on Mars is reasonable. Ergo, your reasoning is unsound.
If you want to make a criticism based on the amount of money being spent, that's one thing--but when it comes to pure science, the whole "We did some experiments and found no evidence to support the hypothesis, so the hypothesis is wrong, even though observational data backs it up" thing just doesn't fly. Imagine Oppenheimer: "Well, my math says that we can split the atom, so I tried it with a knife, a crowbar, and a turkey sandwich--none of these worked, so I guess it's impossible to split the atom."
The robots act based on specific sensor input. That sensor input is quite tightly bounded and can thus be simulated. From what I understand modeling sensors is not really that easy, but that could be dependent upon the nature of the sensor. I imagine that simulating a laser rangefinder is easier than, say, an eyeball. Check out the writeup on the AI in Halo sometime--it's not much more advanced than, say, Doom, because actually modeling a bad guy looking at you and deciding to shoot at you is difficult--so there are cheats, hacks, and workarounds so the player has a simulation of a simulation of intelligence (like reading fark.com) :)
So, perhaps you are correct. But, speaking from experience, I'd still say it's almost always worthwhile to do a real-world test even for something this simple, just because you almost always find stuff that you didn't think of when you set up the model (or stuff that you could not have thought of, in any meaningful sense, until you see them happening). So, fluid dynamics are pretty well understood, but we still do wind-tunnel tests for a new airframe. Also, if the robots get any more complex than they already are, the computational costs will just get extravagant--a problem with physical models, which is why you have physics problems that begin with "Assume a point-shaped or spherical cow..."
Well...no. It looks like you're just restating the previous point: "The innate behavior of the individuals is known, ergo the group can be modeled as an aggregation of individuals." But we keep finding that this is not the case. The group behavior doesn't emerge out of nowhere, it emerges out of interaction effects that we didn't forsee. Or, in other words, you can't model the interaction effects because they haven't been observed yet; you're not modeling a group, you're modeling a herd of individuals.
:) In military circles you have Boyd's concept of OODA loops--it just doesn't make sense to try to model a platoon as 20 infantrymen. "A half a platoon" doesn't make sense from the standpoint of modeling a platoon, anymore than "half a machine gunner" makes sense when you're modeling the individuals.
Of course you can make an educated guess, which sounds like what you're suggesting, but quite often the reality differs radically from the model, usually from something really innocuous. And then you say "What? That shouldn't matter!" but it does, and then you have to add it to the model
Interaction effects result in "emergent" behavior because it's not readily apparent from the behavior of individuals. That is to say, sense-and-respond cycles are not easy to model unless you start out with a lot of data. A good example is ants--single ants wandering around demonstrate chaotic behavior in time and in space, whereas large numbers of ants demonstrate very ordered behavior (purposeful movement, all taking rests at the same time, etc.). We can model this because we've seen it, but before we ever saw it, it would probably have been outside of our abilities to predict that it would happen.
In terms of complexity hierarchy, it doesn't make sense to make a model that is just an aggregation of different objects. You don't talk about the group behavior entirely in terms of the objects making up the group, because the objects don't demonstrate group behavior--the group does--so in some sense "half a herd of robots" doesn't make any sense. From the perspective from which the group behavior is evident, the group is a unitary individual.
Clear as mud?
Very informative, thank you very much :)
Sorry, you have to choose whether it's ok to legislate morality. I'd prefer to avoid it myself, but unfortunately I guess that's just another set of morals, right?
I think that technically the Congress can do little else besides legislate morality. Every law that they put into effect is theoretically a approximation of some kind of objective and universal moral law. If not, then there's nothing to complain about except when "your side" doesn't get to make the laws. If so, then we can debate the laws and whether or not they should exist.
This is what the Framers did, and then came up with a pretty good document, the goal of which was to limit the government for the purpose of providing the most possible freedom to the people, and in many cases it's clear that some new laws violate this document and therefore are probably immoral. However much the Left wants to debate this, though, I think that it is the reliance on relativism ("Living Document" liberals) that has hamstrung their efforts as they tries to fight the changes being put into practice by the current administration.
Just my $0.02.
If the oil companies were smart, they would start up alternative-energy R&D labs of their own and then they wouldn't lose any of that money, really. They'd just be compelled to do the research themselves (which would save them having to buy the patents and then lock them away, which is what they're going to try to do anyway).
I often wonder why people continually make this assumption. There is no evidence for this point of view, at least none that I've seen. It's an artifact of a certain kind of thinking. Engineers, physicists, IT geeks, most of these are "bottom up" thinkers, which point of view assumes that everything is pretty simple, reductionism ad absurdio is a good idea, etc. But these points of view have difficulty handling interaction effects and forms, hence you have physics textbooks with passages like "Imagine a spherical or point-shaped cow..." Example, my roommate programmed this simulation of ant behavior. Ants act radically different in groups than they do alone--their behavior forms spatial patterns and also patterns in the time scale. So he reads up on ant behavior and makes this part of the simulation--"See? The complex behavior is part of the ant." But he doesn't seem to want to wrap his brain around the idea that the complex behavior was not observable by one ant alone, so the complex behavior is not just an aggregation of individual behaviors. They acted properly because he made them act properly, but the internal rules that actually govern the behavior are unknown. There may be limits to our cognitive ability to understand the universe, ergo, it will always remain complex--assuming it is not does not mean that it is not...not if you're really a scientist (empiricist) anyway. 'Course, I could be completely full of shit, who knows?
Just an addendum, complexity does not necessarily have anything to do with code length, but more with interactions (Goodwin again). A large organism is not really "explainable" in purely bottom-up terms, not in any intelligible sense anyway. In a top-down fashion you also need to view it as a unit in and of itself.
Actually, the tendency for species is to evolve towards increased complexity; see How the Leopard Changed Its Spots by Brian Goodwin.
If you want to use the evolution metaphor, I supposed GUIs are members of a species with few selection pressures: we purchase whatever is offered, without even bitching a lot. There are some UIs that are so horrible that they die quickly--evolutionary dead ends with their metaphorical organs outside their metaphorical skin. In this scenario variation among organisms has less to do with selection pressures and more to do with random events--ie there was no demand for OSX's dashboard until OSX was released and made the default XP desktop look like something the cat coughed up--so innovation could be analogous to punctuated equilibrium. OSX is successful so we should expect its features to show up in other UIs, like KDE4.
Because the environment is not placing that much pressure on the competing species, you wind up with some features that drastically reduce survivability, some that drastically increase it, and a whole lot of cruft that does neither.
Well, you could do a basic requirements analysis and figure out where the "key points" are, what they are, what could happen if they were degraded or taken offline, and then what you could do to compensate. Basically, the country needs our "cyber" infrastructure in both the short term (disaster response communications) and long term (Wall Street). So you ask yourself what contingency plans we might have if a biological attack occurred at the same time as a power plant failure, or you might look at financial networks and try to figure out what their weaknesses are and correct them, come up with some plans in case they go down, anticipate what will happen to our banking and so forth if they all die. And so forth.
Nah, who am I kidding? He's going to drop a billion dollars on "security" software. So long as Sandra Bullock is around to bail us out, though, I'm not worried.
They play Counterstrike in their time off?
-5 Redundant.
For about the millionth time...these projects are not aimed at dirt poor countries, they are aimed at countries that already have some infrastructure.
So do the initial negative results mean that the positive result is false, even though there was currently no known theory??
Not at all! But they do mean that the initial explanation of events lacked sufficient explanatory power and so were discarded in favor of theories that did not. Later on you get a better understanding (e.g. one that includes wind), and you can explain the results you got. You see now that you have a very specific set of data ("If you tie this paper-and-stick apparatus, weighing no more than X ounces, to a string, then wind of sufficient velocity will keep it aloft indefinitely") and a theory that adequately explains the data, whereas before you had a bunch of junk science. It's also important to note that the new theory doesn't contradict the prevailing, VERY STRONG theory (gravity, etc.); it complements it.
Popper would probably explain to you that experimental negation does not prove that cold fusion is impossible, but it does prove that cold fusion does not work as described by the experimenters with their theory and data sets. If you're going to try for a Kuhnian paradigm shift you need a lot more than what we've got.
Ah...so...a factoid has truthiness.
The more you know...
I'm not sure I follow your point. Mine is that anyone can argue 'til they're blue in the face that windows is somehow empirically "better" or has "more features," but none of that is necessarily germane to the argument because "better" is a term relative to the needs of the user. For a basic home user (in this case, a high school student who wants to send e-mail, browse MySpace, chat on IM, and type up history papers), a distro like Kubuntu is indistinguishable from XP except in one area--the price tag.
If, however, you have a project whose specific requirements are best met by using a windows product, by all means, go for it. Again, the point is that "better" is judged relevant to your needs.
I would, however, give the following anecdotal evidence...at work we have a truly hutongous data warehouse. We do not use a native windows app--we have a gigantic SAS database running on Sun boxes. Most of the users access the data via a web interface--the pages are served from a Linux box that runs Apache. We use Outlook to trade e-mails, IE to grab data, and Word to type up reports. That's the extent to which we are a windows shop. You can go on and on about how Windows > Linux because it has "more features" but once again, are these features germane to my needs? 99% of the time the answer is "no."
One last thing--at home, I have the choice between Firefox and IE. IE has many more features (.net for example) but most of these are nothing more to me than a reason to apply new patches every month. Firefox, on the other hand, has plugins and extensions, written by other users, that I actually find useful. So in my mind, in most cases, open source comes out ahead, because it gets the job done and costs less. I really don't see how any other considerations are important.
I run a nonprofit wherein I refurbish people's castoff computers, install Kubuntu, and then give them away to high school students in my area who can't afford their own computers (we also do fundraisers to pay for their DSL).
There is no way we could afford Windows licenses (we have placed about sixty boxes since January). Kubuntu is free.
To the end-user, who in this case only needs to type papers, send e-mail, and surf the web (ie, the vast majority of users), Kubuntu is a much better deal than XP. There is absolutely no comparison. None of the things you posted up there matter; even if MS Office is a superior product to OpenOffice (which I'll grant), for a basic user, MS Office's advantages are a non-issue, because they only ever use the most basic features (type, spellcheck, put text in italics, maybe insert footnotes, etc.).
I'll also allow that if you want to play games, typically you gotta be running a windows box. But then again, if I want to play new games, there is a hardware buy-in as well as the software buy-in for the XP license--I gotta shell out for the newest 3D card, more RAM, etc. already anyway, so I think gaming is a special case.
I suppose it just comes down to what specific application you're using the box for, eh?
The reason we have those laws in place is because of an assumption on the part of the Founding Fathers that whenever the government is not being completely transparent, then it's up to no good. People in power always need a watchdog.