That assumption is that current methods of teaching are producing as good a product (if you'll forgive the prodcutization metaphor for human learning for a second) as can be produced.
That's not my assumption. My assumption is that current methods of teaching are hard up against a wall created by attempting to get lower capability students to graduate on what society deems equal terms. My opinion of current teaching methods is that they are bottom of the barrel, contaminated by a completely senseless focus on sports and other rah-rah, and that they produce very poorly educated people of all capabilities. What I'm saying, though, is that changing this is very, very hard to do because every typical parent thinks their little snowflake is the very peak of evolution and will scream like a scalded penguin if the system changes in any way that (cough) disadvantages their child. I think we're also talking about different orders of magnitude here. Yes, we could institute teaching protocols that made sure kids could balance a checkbook, and that would indeed be a tiny step forward. What I'm advocating, though, is bringing kids out of high school with a solid understanding of physics, impeccable higher math skills, well honed critical thinking and logical abilities -- and as I say, we can't get there from here.
There's just no reason to believe that we have hit on the best way educate people or get them interested in educating themselves
You're talking about technical means. Completely agree. There are tons of options, and the best ones are all found outside of schools. But it isn't technical means that are holding us back. It's social: high school classes only go as fast as the general mob can go... and that's not very fast. This isn't just a convenience; this is a situation created by all those parents wanting to be sure little Johnny graduates with the rest of his class, even though little Johnny is basically as dumb as a post.
You've mentioned your experience. Here's mine: Every day, I sat in math class, in science class, bored out of my skull because I'd already read the books, already done the work, been there, read that, did the problems, was interested in going somewhere further... but they weren't even going to finish the book by the end of the school year. It was like being embedded in mud. And it was all about how fast the entire class could go -- didn't matter one bit if you could work ahead. The A's I got were no different than the A's the football player the next seat over got, and I guarantee you that fellow didn't leave high school understanding the pythagorean theorem or the scientific method, much less basic chemistry or with the ability to tell you what the constitution said. The slowest kid in the class is a ball and chain on the rest of them. Even if you started with 100 IQ and went up, it'd still be like being embedded in mud. I want to see kids with uniformly brilliant minds. No more of this "whatever evolution shit out." And that's where I think effort should be focused. When we get there, odds are excellent that the whole teaching idea will need to be re-thought anyway.
During the summer, when other kids were wasting their lives, I was doing correspondence courses on electronics and had a pretty amazing chemistry lab in our basement; the kid across the street and I both mowed lawns; he bought a minibike; I bought a microscope. He bought cigarettes and beer; I bought components and built a TTL-based computer, then later an 8008 one, finally a SWTPC commercial one. He played baseball; I built a pirate radio station. He bought pop music... I was in a band. He watched TV. I read books. He was dull - I was not. Get rid of dull and the whole world is likely to change. So let's get rid of dull. Then we can toss the current educational system out the window.
I'm completely against mommy laws. So several of the proposals you present there are a bad idea as far as I'm concerned. Also, every proposal you have there can be implemented by any individual without any lawmaking at all. Stop drinking crap soda. Stop smoking. Eat fresh foods that aren't packaged in plastic. Research the content of your foods. I agree that the laws you select for removal should indeed be removed (along with the vast majority of other laws, I might add.)
Quite aside from that, you're talking about a swing of a few points. I'm talking about 50, perhaps a hundred or more. You're trying to address a problem that needs a bulldozer with a teaspoon.
To say we are currently doing all we can now is quite simply incorrect.
We're doing more than we should do. Far too much regulation. Adding more creates new problems and isn't worth the candle.
The fact that there are plenty of people who can concentrate and apply focus should tell you that plucking those particular low-hanging fruit are a simple matter of behavior modification -- doesn't take money at all. Don't engage with facebook, eschew television, don't drink, don't smoke, eat well, etc... there's really nothing to be done other than what has already been done. All you have to do is look at how and where you spend your time and apply just a little common sense.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, is distributed scattershot across the population over an unfortunately wide range that causes huge hardship and achievement barriers for those on the left side of the present gaussian that cannot be significantly remediated by changes in behavior, while at the same time it dumbs down the curriculum by an astonishing degree. The existence of a solution seems highly probable, but it is so deeply buried in the noise of all that DNA coding, plus facing questions of delivery and side effects, that not focusing intense effort on it at any point seems virtually certain to move it far into the future, and by inaction, to continue great harms.
The problem is the Gaussian, and what it means. Right now, the middle (100) is populated by people who just aren't that bright. That's the normal state of affairs; you're not going to be pushing a lot of education or critical thinking ability into that zone, much less across the left side. That's a good deal more than half the population. The center of the gaussian has to mean something considerably more elevated, and we need for the left end to never, ever go as low as the center is now.
The solution -- not yet feasible -- is to figure out WTF it is in our genetic software that codes for intelligence, and then make sure that stuff is turned on (gross simplification) for children to come (and for the already present too, if it can help retroactively, who knows.) That'll be the first generation that we can really educate well, without dumbing down everything from preschool to high school so that Smith and Williams can graduate on (cough) "equal terms" with Einstein and Curie.
Once the classroom is loaded with minds of comparable and relatively high power, that's the time to decide how best to educate them. Not right now. Right now, we're completely stuck with trying to get across how to balance a checkbook, what compound interest means, and even *that* doesn't seem to penetrate into a lot of minds -- just look at the debt situation of the average person.
So... if one were wondering where to put dollars in order to bring the human race up to a better educated standard, genetics is the answer. Because, and I know this isn't politically correct, but still... you just can't fix stupid with education. There is no curriculum that will help significantly, no methodology, no encouragement, no special combination of beatings.... no nothing in the mundane process of teaching and learning that will help. What you have to do is eliminate stupid.
Genetics likely holds the keys to a whole lot of benefits on other fronts as well. Health, stability, longevity, that sort of thing.
It is my fondest hope that at some point, having a child without technically seeing to it that it will be as intelligent, healthy, and stable as possible will be considered child abuse.
Actually, she's been de-comissioned and re-comissioned several times. So the "continuous" thing has some holes in it. The stretch I quoted was the longest in-service stretch where she was legitimately a member of the fighting force to be reckoned with.
Being assigned to the crew of Constitution is still a very much sought after posting due to the prestige of the posting. Only the very best and brightest ever get such duty.
Two members of my family have served aboard her; hence my particular interest.
...to be retired after fifty years of active service — the longest of any warship in U.S. naval history.
The USS Constitution, launched in 1798, retired from active service in 1856, after 58 years of active service. And after that, she was turned into a school ship, then a whole bunch of that kind of service, and she's still afloat today, the official "symbolic flagship" of the US fleet.
Fyngyrz was fantasizing about "headless" tasks... The CPU simply doesn't have the oomph to do much more.
No, I wasn't. You have no idea what you're talking about. You're probably thinking of OO software written to slog along in 3 ghz machines; I can tell you flatly that you use a straight C compiler --- or assembler -- do you remember assembler? -- and you can get *great* performance for a whole lot of things out of this thing's CPU. Think back to the Amiga: 20 MHz cpu, 4...8 MB (that's MEGabyte) of ram... and the things you could do were amazing. In fact, there were things you could do you STILL can't do with modern GPUs, such as multiple screen resolutions/bitdepths at once and true sprites, and I doubt those are present in the rpi.
All that needs done with the rpi is some programmers with decent chops get after this thing. It could do everything from PCB layout and schematic capture to SSTV, games, spreadsheets, word processing and more. And of course if it'll support python, etc., the scripting possibilities alone are almost endless.
The "problem" is that modern coding is really a very sloppy area. But perhaps for $35, people will be willing to learn to write well again.
It has better connectivity -- not just HDMI, but any old display device that'll take video. It has (far) more channels. It has open-source, non-walled-garden channel creation code. It has more outputs. More inputs. More stuff to watch and listen to. It's cheap (the low end one is *really* cheap!) The remote is (way) better. In fact, the only thing I don't like about the Roku is you can't put it to sleep and you can't really turn it off... it takes too long to boot to turn it off.
Apple is way behind the curve here. They don't understand the market. And I have to say, that doesn't bode well for any upcoming television sets; if they're thinking integration of the Apple TV with a display screen is going to be the new hotness... no, it isn't.
Dude, the pogoplug, sheevaplug and dockstar are all more than twice as expensive as the pi. Those dollars matter. $35 is cookie jar money for a lot more people than $80 or $90 is. It's not just HDMI, it's HDMI and price and expandability.
but the sobering reality is that it's just another low-powered Linux computer. It does not open up new possibilities.
Um. Well, we will see. Personally, I am pretty confident it will. There are thresholds beyond which certain effects don't occur, and $100 of cookie jar injury is probably one of them. $35... a lot less so. $35 that plugs right into your HD tv or monitor... ok, now we're cooking.
Will LED become next generation of cooling appliance?
"That's a bright idea, he said coldly."
Also, heat-activated lighting. Also, if you can suck heat from the environment to make light, and then pump the light to solar cells to make electricity, you have a heat-to-electric converter.
Maxwell's demon must be rolling over in his randomly displaced bed right about now.
...is the equivalent of 1024-bit audio. Completely unnecessary, a number basically born of snake oil, and in the end, mainly silly.
HD (1920x1080) is *plenty* for 2D gaming. Or 2D movies. The next step of any interest at all is 3D, and that will indeed require more display bandwidth, but oddly enough, still about the same number of triangles -- gaming is (for 3d-ish titles) the process of converting a 3D map of the world into a 2D format. For real 3d displays (not the lame 2D stereo they're pawning of on us right now), the data is going to be very similar to what they're processing already, only the display hardware at the very end of the processing chain will have to change -- more polygons / triangles have to make it to the display hardware, but they're the same ones that have been in the models all along.
The next really big thing will be that true 3D display on your desktop. Speaking as someone who has, and really enjoys, 1920x1080, progressive, on a big screen, there's no "new hotness" that could entice me to step beyond that with just resolution.
But a real volumetric 3d display... and content... oh yeah, they can have my money for that. Right now.
To see what goodies people will come up with that can be "stuck on" this thing. Power monitoring, sensors of all kinds, cameras, serial and parallel ports, wifi and bluetooth, ham radio, maybe an SDR front end, a real time clock (a notable missing hunk-o-hardware), etc.
No, let's not. This is one very exciting little hunk of hardware. It's legitimate news that the software is ready, too.
Hey! Did you know that if you're not interested in a story, you can do this thing called "not clicking on it" and that'll keep it ENTIRELY out of your hair? it's high-tech, I know, and not everyone has the 'leet skillz to be able to pull a complex operation like that off, but hey, maybe with some remedial evening classes at your local community college, you too can learn to only click on stories that interest you!
Sure, you decided that it wasn't worth the cost which is fine, but don't act as if there's no benefit whatsoever.
Look, if you fatally shoot yourself in the face there's almost always a benefit to the flower shop, but that doesn't make the overall experience even close to "a good thing." There's a difference between "no benefit whatsoever" and "overall not of benefit" that is not resolved by small compensations, especially when those compensations could be had in other ways.
Facebook is there to mine your presence and your postings and your contact's postings for profitable information which it then sells to corporations and gives away to the government, all without any reasonable oversight on the part of the Facebook member.
But wait, there's more: They encourage third party targeting of your personal life by linking other people's images and postings to you without your consent, they store your stuff after you thought you deleted it and they make it available to others, they actually sell their database of stuff (including yours) to corporations (just like Twitter, I should point out)...
On top of all that, they have extremely odious terms of service, terms that toss the idea of rehabilitation aside and promote the existence of an unrecoverable, unredeemable, unemployable, untouchable low class. Pee on a bush, or streak, or do any one of a number of not particularly troublesome things and end up on that magical, won't-save-the-children sexual offenders list? Not only can you not live near a playground, get a decent job, or ever vote again... even Facebook deems you unworthy. It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad and misguided. Not to mention based on entirely wrongheaded ideas.
Facebook is not a good thing. Popular? Sure. That's because people just aren't very well informed (a good number of them don't even have the mental capacity to understand the issues), and because even people who could understand if they were clear on what is going on are just very poorly educated and not well versed in critical thinking.
And then there's these last couple of generations amazing propensity to share until conventional social boundaries are inverted... I'm talking about the kind of behaviors that lead to a clutch of teenagers walking down the street or sitting at a table in a restaurant, all with their cellphones pressed to their ears or fingering out a text, all the while ignoring the people right at their elbows. That is truly bizarre behavior. Facebook encourages it, and that's clearly a bad thing.
Me, I have no Facebook account; I turn off my phone when I have a guest, or am a guest; I don't talk or "share" when listening to music or perusing a film; and I don't respond to being told something by immediately turning around and spewing out some similar experience (that's just part of being a good listener, but I have noticed that particular misbehavior is very prevalent in the younger generations right now... it may be related to the whole social media thing. When someone tells you about X, the good listener listens, enquiring about that incident of X, rather than trying to riposte with their own experience of X-prime.)
Popularity does not equal goodness. Slavery was popular. The Nazis were popular. The drug war was popular (not so much these days, but look at the harm that's been done in its name already... lots more to come before society kills prohibition V2, I'm afraid.) Religion is popular. And hey... Facebook is popular, too.
I remember all the rampant rumors and speculation leading up to the iPad. The lowest price guessed was $800. When it was announced at $499, Apple's competitors must have crapped in their pants.
This. And today, when the iPad2 model was dropped like a rock at $399, I suspect those same competitors are getting close to lopping their own heads off with a blunt spoon.
Looks to me like Apple has simply sewn up the market as of today. Be interesting to see what the competition does, such as it is.
Without the DMCA, for example, YouTube would have been stillborn.
Ok, now you're just teasing us with a dangling, forlorn hope. No more blurry videos of idiots, nowhere for the dumbest comment writers on the planet to spew their endless misspellings and mangling of grammar and pop-culture bewilderment? Un-possible!
No. Just, NO. Youtube will always be with us. "Shall not infringe" will always mean "infringe all you want"; and we have always been at war with Eastasia. Uh, drugs. No wait, with the children. For, I mean. Well, you know. Stuff.
So far, converting to non-DRM formats has been trivial. Not seeing a problem here. Not yet. Maybe never.
Let me point something else out: Historically speaking, not being able to read data has been almost exclusively a problem with the fact that there is little or no hardware that can access the data -- in other words, it was on tape, 8 inch floppy, punched cards, wax cylinders, etc. Once stuff is on broad based storage from modern HDs to the network "somewhere", the reader code is out there too and there's no reason to think it will go away. i have a 6809 emulation that reads all my data starting back in 1974 because I moved it as time went on; there was never a *format* problem, there was only a media problem. I have every letter I wrote from those years, book manuscripts, program, etc. And if you think, with all these e-books out there, very easily accessible, that society will "accidentally" or via neglect forget how to read them... nah, I just don't buy your premise. Not going to happen.
I can still read all the image formats starting from the early 1970's and going forward without a break. Nothing has become unrecoverable. I can still read text files. JPEG has been around as a standard since 1986, that's 26 years (so far) and everything reads them just fine. Not even a *hint* that'll go away. Likewise GIF, only for (at least) a year longer. I can still read and render HTML, too, even with XHTML and HTML 5 and so forth out there. ASCII text files are a doddle, and in fact I can still read EBCDIC and Baudot codes. There's absolutely no reason to think I won't be able to read the e-books I've purchased rights to in 20 years. So, no. Just no.:)
Lastly, were the unthinkable to come true and a certain type of e-book lose its reader, leaving owners with binary gobbledegook, just how long do you think it would be before some intrepid coder took that as a challenge and solved the problem? I give it... maybe a week. That allows time for pizza and bathroom breaks.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not my assumption. My assumption is that current methods of teaching are hard up against a wall created by attempting to get lower capability students to graduate on what society deems equal terms. My opinion of current teaching methods is that they are bottom of the barrel, contaminated by a completely senseless focus on sports and other rah-rah, and that they produce very poorly educated people of all capabilities. What I'm saying, though, is that changing this is very, very hard to do because every typical parent thinks their little snowflake is the very peak of evolution and will scream like a scalded penguin if the system changes in any way that (cough) disadvantages their child. I think we're also talking about different orders of magnitude here. Yes, we could institute teaching protocols that made sure kids could balance a checkbook, and that would indeed be a tiny step forward. What I'm advocating, though, is bringing kids out of high school with a solid understanding of physics, impeccable higher math skills, well honed critical thinking and logical abilities -- and as I say, we can't get there from here.
You're talking about technical means. Completely agree. There are tons of options, and the best ones are all found outside of schools. But it isn't technical means that are holding us back. It's social: high school classes only go as fast as the general mob can go... and that's not very fast. This isn't just a convenience; this is a situation created by all those parents wanting to be sure little Johnny graduates with the rest of his class, even though little Johnny is basically as dumb as a post.
You've mentioned your experience. Here's mine: Every day, I sat in math class, in science class, bored out of my skull because I'd already read the books, already done the work, been there, read that, did the problems, was interested in going somewhere further... but they weren't even going to finish the book by the end of the school year. It was like being embedded in mud. And it was all about how fast the entire class could go -- didn't matter one bit if you could work ahead. The A's I got were no different than the A's the football player the next seat over got, and I guarantee you that fellow didn't leave high school understanding the pythagorean theorem or the scientific method, much less basic chemistry or with the ability to tell you what the constitution said. The slowest kid in the class is a ball and chain on the rest of them. Even if you started with 100 IQ and went up, it'd still be like being embedded in mud. I want to see kids with uniformly brilliant minds. No more of this "whatever evolution shit out." And that's where I think effort should be focused. When we get there, odds are excellent that the whole teaching idea will need to be re-thought anyway.
During the summer, when other kids were wasting their lives, I was doing correspondence courses on electronics and had a pretty amazing chemistry lab in our basement; the kid across the street and I both mowed lawns; he bought a minibike; I bought a microscope. He bought cigarettes and beer; I bought components and built a TTL-based computer, then later an 8008 one, finally a SWTPC commercial one. He played baseball; I built a pirate radio station. He bought pop music... I was in a band. He watched TV. I read books. He was dull - I was not. Get rid of dull and the whole world is likely to change. So let's get rid of dull. Then we can toss the current educational system out the window.
I'm completely against mommy laws. So several of the proposals you present there are a bad idea as far as I'm concerned. Also, every proposal you have there can be implemented by any individual without any lawmaking at all. Stop drinking crap soda. Stop smoking. Eat fresh foods that aren't packaged in plastic. Research the content of your foods. I agree that the laws you select for removal should indeed be removed (along with the vast majority of other laws, I might add.)
Quite aside from that, you're talking about a swing of a few points. I'm talking about 50, perhaps a hundred or more. You're trying to address a problem that needs a bulldozer with a teaspoon.
We're doing more than we should do. Far too much regulation. Adding more creates new problems and isn't worth the candle.
==> NATO officials... with Facebook accounts...
Oh. My. God.
The fact that there are plenty of people who can concentrate and apply focus should tell you that plucking those particular low-hanging fruit are a simple matter of behavior modification -- doesn't take money at all. Don't engage with facebook, eschew television, don't drink, don't smoke, eat well, etc... there's really nothing to be done other than what has already been done. All you have to do is look at how and where you spend your time and apply just a little common sense.
Human intelligence, on the other hand, is distributed scattershot across the population over an unfortunately wide range that causes huge hardship and achievement barriers for those on the left side of the present gaussian that cannot be significantly remediated by changes in behavior, while at the same time it dumbs down the curriculum by an astonishing degree. The existence of a solution seems highly probable, but it is so deeply buried in the noise of all that DNA coding, plus facing questions of delivery and side effects, that not focusing intense effort on it at any point seems virtually certain to move it far into the future, and by inaction, to continue great harms.
The problem is the Gaussian, and what it means. Right now, the middle (100) is populated by people who just aren't that bright. That's the normal state of affairs; you're not going to be pushing a lot of education or critical thinking ability into that zone, much less across the left side. That's a good deal more than half the population. The center of the gaussian has to mean something considerably more elevated, and we need for the left end to never, ever go as low as the center is now.
The solution -- not yet feasible -- is to figure out WTF it is in our genetic software that codes for intelligence, and then make sure that stuff is turned on (gross simplification) for children to come (and for the already present too, if it can help retroactively, who knows.) That'll be the first generation that we can really educate well, without dumbing down everything from preschool to high school so that Smith and Williams can graduate on (cough) "equal terms" with Einstein and Curie.
Once the classroom is loaded with minds of comparable and relatively high power, that's the time to decide how best to educate them. Not right now. Right now, we're completely stuck with trying to get across how to balance a checkbook, what compound interest means, and even *that* doesn't seem to penetrate into a lot of minds -- just look at the debt situation of the average person.
So... if one were wondering where to put dollars in order to bring the human race up to a better educated standard, genetics is the answer. Because, and I know this isn't politically correct, but still... you just can't fix stupid with education. There is no curriculum that will help significantly, no methodology, no encouragement, no special combination of beatings.... no nothing in the mundane process of teaching and learning that will help. What you have to do is eliminate stupid.
Genetics likely holds the keys to a whole lot of benefits on other fronts as well. Health, stability, longevity, that sort of thing.
It is my fondest hope that at some point, having a child without technically seeing to it that it will be as intelligent, healthy, and stable as possible will be considered child abuse.
Actually, she's been de-comissioned and re-comissioned several times. So the "continuous" thing has some holes in it. The stretch I quoted was the longest in-service stretch where she was legitimately a member of the fighting force to be reckoned with.
Two members of my family have served aboard her; hence my particular interest.
The USS Constitution, launched in 1798, retired from active service in 1856, after 58 years of active service. And after that, she was turned into a school ship, then a whole bunch of that kind of service, and she's still afloat today, the official "symbolic flagship" of the US fleet.
No, I wasn't. You have no idea what you're talking about. You're probably thinking of OO software written to slog along in 3 ghz machines; I can tell you flatly that you use a straight C compiler --- or assembler -- do you remember assembler? -- and you can get *great* performance for a whole lot of things out of this thing's CPU. Think back to the Amiga: 20 MHz cpu, 4...8 MB (that's MEGabyte) of ram... and the things you could do were amazing. In fact, there were things you could do you STILL can't do with modern GPUs, such as multiple screen resolutions/bitdepths at once and true sprites, and I doubt those are present in the rpi.
All that needs done with the rpi is some programmers with decent chops get after this thing. It could do everything from PCB layout and schematic capture to SSTV, games, spreadsheets, word processing and more. And of course if it'll support python, etc., the scripting possibilities alone are almost endless.
The "problem" is that modern coding is really a very sloppy area. But perhaps for $35, people will be willing to learn to write well again.
It has better connectivity -- not just HDMI, but any old display device that'll take video. It has (far) more channels. It has open-source, non-walled-garden channel creation code. It has more outputs. More inputs. More stuff to watch and listen to. It's cheap (the low end one is *really* cheap!) The remote is (way) better. In fact, the only thing I don't like about the Roku is you can't put it to sleep and you can't really turn it off... it takes too long to boot to turn it off.
Apple is way behind the curve here. They don't understand the market. And I have to say, that doesn't bode well for any upcoming television sets; if they're thinking integration of the Apple TV with a display screen is going to be the new hotness... no, it isn't.
Dude, the pogoplug, sheevaplug and dockstar are all more than twice as expensive as the pi. Those dollars matter. $35 is cookie jar money for a lot more people than $80 or $90 is. It's not just HDMI, it's HDMI and price and expandability.
Um. Well, we will see. Personally, I am pretty confident it will. There are thresholds beyond which certain effects don't occur, and $100 of cookie jar injury is probably one of them. $35... a lot less so. $35 that plugs right into your HD tv or monitor... ok, now we're cooking.
Ok, maybe those 'leet skills are even a little more 'leet than I thought.
"That's a bright idea, he said coldly."
Also, heat-activated lighting. Also, if you can suck heat from the environment to make light, and then pump the light to solar cells to make electricity, you have a heat-to-electric converter.
Maxwell's demon must be rolling over in his randomly displaced bed right about now.
HD (1920x1080) is *plenty* for 2D gaming. Or 2D movies. The next step of any interest at all is 3D, and that will indeed require more display bandwidth, but oddly enough, still about the same number of triangles -- gaming is (for 3d-ish titles) the process of converting a 3D map of the world into a 2D format. For real 3d displays (not the lame 2D stereo they're pawning of on us right now), the data is going to be very similar to what they're processing already, only the display hardware at the very end of the processing chain will have to change -- more polygons / triangles have to make it to the display hardware, but they're the same ones that have been in the models all along.
The next really big thing will be that true 3D display on your desktop. Speaking as someone who has, and really enjoys, 1920x1080, progressive, on a big screen, there's no "new hotness" that could entice me to step beyond that with just resolution.
But a real volumetric 3d display... and content... oh yeah, they can have my money for that. Right now.
To see what goodies people will come up with that can be "stuck on" this thing. Power monitoring, sensors of all kinds, cameras, serial and parallel ports, wifi and bluetooth, ham radio, maybe an SDR front end, a real time clock (a notable missing hunk-o-hardware), etc.
mmmm, cheap computing. MMMMM!
No, let's not. This is one very exciting little hunk of hardware. It's legitimate news that the software is ready, too.
Hey! Did you know that if you're not interested in a story, you can do this thing called "not clicking on it" and that'll keep it ENTIRELY out of your hair? it's high-tech, I know, and not everyone has the 'leet skillz to be able to pull a complex operation like that off, but hey, maybe with some remedial evening classes at your local community college, you too can learn to only click on stories that interest you!
Look, if you fatally shoot yourself in the face there's almost always a benefit to the flower shop, but that doesn't make the overall experience even close to "a good thing." There's a difference between "no benefit whatsoever" and "overall not of benefit" that is not resolved by small compensations, especially when those compensations could be had in other ways.
Facebook is there to mine your presence and your postings and your contact's postings for profitable information which it then sells to corporations and gives away to the government, all without any reasonable oversight on the part of the Facebook member.
But wait, there's more: They encourage third party targeting of your personal life by linking other people's images and postings to you without your consent, they store your stuff after you thought you deleted it and they make it available to others, they actually sell their database of stuff (including yours) to corporations (just like Twitter, I should point out)...
On top of all that, they have extremely odious terms of service, terms that toss the idea of rehabilitation aside and promote the existence of an unrecoverable, unredeemable, unemployable, untouchable low class. Pee on a bush, or streak, or do any one of a number of not particularly troublesome things and end up on that magical, won't-save-the-children sexual offenders list? Not only can you not live near a playground, get a decent job, or ever vote again... even Facebook deems you unworthy. It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad and misguided. Not to mention based on entirely wrongheaded ideas.
Facebook is not a good thing. Popular? Sure. That's because people just aren't very well informed (a good number of them don't even have the mental capacity to understand the issues), and because even people who could understand if they were clear on what is going on are just very poorly educated and not well versed in critical thinking.
And then there's these last couple of generations amazing propensity to share until conventional social boundaries are inverted... I'm talking about the kind of behaviors that lead to a clutch of teenagers walking down the street or sitting at a table in a restaurant, all with their cellphones pressed to their ears or fingering out a text, all the while ignoring the people right at their elbows. That is truly bizarre behavior. Facebook encourages it, and that's clearly a bad thing.
Me, I have no Facebook account; I turn off my phone when I have a guest, or am a guest; I don't talk or "share" when listening to music or perusing a film; and I don't respond to being told something by immediately turning around and spewing out some similar experience (that's just part of being a good listener, but I have noticed that particular misbehavior is very prevalent in the younger generations right now... it may be related to the whole social media thing. When someone tells you about X, the good listener listens, enquiring about that incident of X, rather than trying to riposte with their own experience of X-prime.)
Popularity does not equal goodness. Slavery was popular. The Nazis were popular. The drug war was popular (not so much these days, but look at the harm that's been done in its name already... lots more to come before society kills prohibition V2, I'm afraid.) Religion is popular. And hey... Facebook is popular, too.
And Google maps has satellite / mixed mode views. Google is *way* ahead.
This. And today, when the iPad2 model was dropped like a rock at $399, I suspect those same competitors are getting close to lopping their own heads off with a blunt spoon.
Looks to me like Apple has simply sewn up the market as of today. Be interesting to see what the competition does, such as it is.
(Removal) != (deletion + loss + additional unnecessary harm)
Ok, now you're just teasing us with a dangling, forlorn hope. No more blurry videos of idiots, nowhere for the dumbest comment writers on the planet to spew their endless misspellings and mangling of grammar and pop-culture bewilderment? Un-possible!
No. Just, NO. Youtube will always be with us. "Shall not infringe" will always mean "infringe all you want"; and we have always been at war with Eastasia. Uh, drugs. No wait, with the children. For, I mean. Well, you know. Stuff.
Ron Paul. Best choice by far.
To elaborate: Money; Time; Stress; Interference with your life; potential for losing even when you are in the right.
Avoid the US court system by any means practical -- it is corrupt, biased, unfair, and in the final analysis, unjust.
No. They didn't. They could easily have asked the account holder about the image before completely fucking up.
So far, converting to non-DRM formats has been trivial. Not seeing a problem here. Not yet. Maybe never.
Let me point something else out: Historically speaking, not being able to read data has been almost exclusively a problem with the fact that there is little or no hardware that can access the data -- in other words, it was on tape, 8 inch floppy, punched cards, wax cylinders, etc. Once stuff is on broad based storage from modern HDs to the network "somewhere", the reader code is out there too and there's no reason to think it will go away. i have a 6809 emulation that reads all my data starting back in 1974 because I moved it as time went on; there was never a *format* problem, there was only a media problem. I have every letter I wrote from those years, book manuscripts, program, etc. And if you think, with all these e-books out there, very easily accessible, that society will "accidentally" or via neglect forget how to read them... nah, I just don't buy your premise. Not going to happen.
I can still read all the image formats starting from the early 1970's and going forward without a break. Nothing has become unrecoverable. I can still read text files. JPEG has been around as a standard since 1986, that's 26 years (so far) and everything reads them just fine. Not even a *hint* that'll go away. Likewise GIF, only for (at least) a year longer. I can still read and render HTML, too, even with XHTML and HTML 5 and so forth out there. ASCII text files are a doddle, and in fact I can still read EBCDIC and Baudot codes. There's absolutely no reason to think I won't be able to read the e-books I've purchased rights to in 20 years. So, no. Just no. :)
Lastly, were the unthinkable to come true and a certain type of e-book lose its reader, leaving owners with binary gobbledegook, just how long do you think it would be before some intrepid coder took that as a challenge and solved the problem? I give it... maybe a week. That allows time for pizza and bathroom breaks.
I don't get "popups" on top of my e-books. Ever. Sounds to me like you've got a mis-configured device.