That the parent is currently at +5, and the grandparent at +1, speaks volumes about the people reading this story.
Are you defined by what you think of yourself or how others perceive you? Do you really think because you died with a gross income in your life of 10 million dollars, you will be remembered more than someone that only made $500,000 through their entire life?
the GP didn't suggest that you should devote your time to making money. They suggested that you should try to achieve something meaningful. And most people's self-perception is profoundly affected by their achievements, whether they like it or not.
I could be spending my time helping less fortunate people, or maybe working on an Open Source program that would benefit thousands of people. I may receive praise for such things, but what does this really do?
Your question is ridiculous, since you've just stated what those things achieve, and most people would agree that they're worthwhile objectives. What exactly do you consider worthwhile? A cure for cancer? People who hope to achieve that do not spend all of their time playing WOW.
Or, in 20 years, you can look back at the time when you played only video games. You can remember you had fun doing it, but did not accomplish anything with your life. You will have the memories of those games still, and the fun that you can while playing them.
Sure, you'll remember that you had fun, but you may also regret that you didn't spend your time more productively. Most people have goals that they'd like to achieve throughout their life, like buy a house, or achieve a certain level of education, play some kind of sport, or raise a family. Something that's nice about these goals is that, once achieved, they represent a tangible reminder of your effort, and that the skills required to accomplish them can help you in other areas in your life. In most cases, they'll also raise your quality of life, and allow you to do things that you otherwise couldn't. Playing WOW doesn't seem to advance you toward any of those things. Once you walk away from your computer, you are no better off than when you started. 20 years down the track, you may want a house, wife, job, or degree, and wonder why you played games instead of trying to achieve them.
You're ignoring the idea that maybe, if you use your time wisely, you can play games and achieve other things. No-one is suggesting that you can't take time out to have some fun sometimes. If you start trying to achieve something, you might also discover that things other than video games are fun too! (Shocking, i know.)
Some people feel that they have to help others, and do things beneficial to society, so they can be defined by society as being a productive member. And the only way they can satisfy themselves is to think that what they've done with their lives has made a difference (no matter if it really did or not).
Things that are other people admire are typically things that they'd like to achieve themselves. The point of being productive is not to gain other people's good opinion, but to satisfy your goals in life.
Just because you think something is wrong, doesn't mean it is. Even if laws say that something is wrong, doesn't mean it is. I feel that psychology hasn't fully caught up with the concepts of MMOs, so they tend to be compared to drugs or other bad addictions.
This is getting off-topic, but what exactly is wrong, then? Also, I think psychology is precisely right in comparing MMOs to drugs, in that using them is a lot of fun, but ultimately pointless. The tragedy of bad addictions is that you waste your life on pointless activities, when you could have been doing something worthwhile.
The truest cause of anti-intellectualism is the anti-religion movement
Firstly, you shouldn't equate your feelings regarding truth with those of the 'anti-religion' movement. I highly doubt that many of them feel that truth isn't important without belief in god.
Why truth?
This is a difficult question, because truth is generally accepted as being good in and of itself, even without reference to god. Fortunately, however, science goes even further, in requiring theories that are falsifiable. This means that theories have to have a demonstrable effect on the real world for them to be accepted as sound. So the answer to your question as to why you should care for (scientific) truth is that you can use it to have an effect on the real world. For example, you can build a house that doesn't fall down as a result of scientific truth in physics. And if that isn't enough justification for you, i don't think anyone can help you.
It's amazing and somwhat sad that programming languages and runtime environments from Smalltalk to Java to Python to C#/.NET keep reinventing the wheel while a language from the 1950s has the most advanced form of rabid language advocacy yet -
smug lisp weenies
A "Computer Scientist" is a mathematician specializing in an obscure branch of mathematics. There is no "science" involved.
Describing computer science as maths is like trying to pass off biology as physics. Certainly at some level everything in computer science can be described by maths, (and in certain areas it is just maths) but in many cases the level of abstraction is so high that it's impossible to analyse it. Hence the science.
While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page
The problem with bringing a cognitive search engine to market is that no-one has invented a cognitive anything, let alone a useful search engine. Cyc has been around for a long time, and
has been used in search engine tasks, and hasn't done much. That should tell you how successful that kind of approach is. I assure you that the big 3 of search would bring out cognitive search if they could. Meanwhile, information retrieval hueristics with no pretensions to intelligence continue to do the job in a surprisingly robust way.
Ok, so the Chinese don't think democracy is a basic human right since they don't have democracy. Have you considered the possibility that political dissenters tend to disappear in China? Or get run over by tanks? Perhaps at this time life is good enough in China that they are not willing to risk prosperity by having a violent revolution. But that doesn't mean the Chinese don't value democracy.
Well, you're right in that the chinese government could be supressing democracy (and has in certain events in the past). However, supressing people who want to change government styles is hardly unique to china, or even to non-democratic governments. Irregardless, the chinese do not seem to value democracy as highly as western societies, and its their right to make up their own minds.
Basically, I think democracy must be a natural desire of everyone; those that truly believe that they should be ordered around their whole lives have had the human spirit bred out of them, sadly. The desire to mold your destiny is simply human instict.
i agree that the desire to influence your own destiny is natural and widespread, but i don't think that everybody agrees that democracy is the best way to achieve it. I don't care to argue about my opinions one way or the other, but i'm trying to point out that the chinese have the right to organise themselves in whatever government style they choose, without you passing moral judgement on them or accusing them of being sheep.
My suspicion is that you are reacting to the war in Iraq; specifically, you believe that if you support the creation of democracies worldwide, then you support the war in Iraq by extension. If that's the case, then it's pretty disenginous of you.
the war in Iraq couldn't have been further from my mind, and please don't accuse me of being disenginous based on conjecture.
You have drastically misunderstood his ideas. His idea of freedom is not that people in his culture should be free - it is ALL people have the RIGHT to be free. He might be wrong, but that is his idea. He believes that the Chinese people that disagree are wrong. He has the right to believe they are wrong.
i don't think i've misunderstood him. He (She? Can i assume that 'Crow T. Trollbot' is male?) has the right to hold whatever beliefs he wants, but he suggested that they're universally applicable. I have no problems with people stating their beliefs, but arrogance starts when you suggest that other people's beliefs are wrong.
You are proudly, arrogantly proclaiming your belief that he is wrong, freedom is not an actual, universal truth, it is just a cultural thing.
No, i'm not. i didn't say anything about my views on 'freedom', (once again, freedom to do what?) i just pointed out that beyond things that we do hold as
universal human rights, he shouldn't try to apply his personal moral standards to china when the people there clearly have different beliefs.
thats a very nice speech, but you've managed to miss the point in the same way as the original submitter. YOU (unless you're a citizen of china, which i doubt) are not in a position to tell China what rights to grant its citizens. Its blatantly obvious that they don't think democracy is a basic human right, since they have an at-best quasi-elected government. 'Freedom' doesn't even have any meaning without context - freedom to what? Even in countries that place high value on individual rights, like the US, there's tension between the rights of the individual and the rights of the larger society.
The ideas themselves are no more alien to China...
its very arrogant to suggest that your ideas are the only true beliefs and that those that don't follow them need to be liberated. And try not to speak on behalf of more than a billion people next time, OK?
The first post nailed this stupid article with a stake through the heart.
I think the point of the article was that companies are attempting to influence a group of people whom the technical community look up to. If free samples are to be given, then it's natural to pick an 'elite' to give them to.
While, as others have pointed out, this kind of thing is hardly new, it's disappointing to see commercial interests attempt to bias the information that we recieve even further than it already is. While other instances of free samples have some justification, (for example, reviewers shouldn't have to purchase products that they write about) the fact that they recieve free goods/services should be disclosed and makes me trust the review less than completely unbiased sources. Its not that i think the reviewers are in the pockets of the companies whose products they write about, it's that they are no longer in a position to be completely objective.
The disturbing thing about this silicon valley 100 is they're attempting to influence word-of-mouth style information by giving goods to a selected group of people who have no professional reason to require them. The whole set-up is to try to influence a source of information, word-of-mouth, that we have traditionally trusted as being completely unbiased. If someone recommends a product in passing conversation without further discussion you assume that they have no connection with the product involved, and that they're merely giving you some good advice. In a similar fashion to before, i don't think these people, having recieved free products, are in a position to give unbiased good advice anymore. Although most people won't know this, and i doubt that the 100 are going to start prefixing their discussions with 'i'm not completly unbiased about this, but...'.
So i think that the 100 should refuse the products, otherwise they're abusing the trust of the people they discuss those products with. Way to drag our ethical standards just that little bit lower...
So please enlighten us. How is limiting access to the internet to a reasonable amount of time (depending on the PARENT's standards/values/beliefs) not treating them like human beings?
limiting the amount of time spent on the net is a perfectly reasonable parental thing to do, even used as a carrot. However, the grandparent mentioned non-technical alternatives. As in, instead of having a router automatically determine that they've used their X hours of net time for the day and shut them down, you suggest to them that X hours of net time a day is a reasonable limit and you expect them not to go over it. Learning how to follow limits that aren't immediatly enforced is an important lesson. Telling your kids what to do works for some situations, but they're going to have to learn to control themselves to be effective adults. And kids (rightfully) resent having their lives controlled by someone else if you clamp down too hard.
With all due respect to de Icaza, i think that the grandparent has a point (even if they put it a bit abrasively). Putting de Icaza on a list of software giants that includes K&R, Turing and Stallman doesn't feel right to me.
However, i think that this list is doomed to be meaningless anyway, because they haven't given any criteria as to what makes a software giant. Commercial success? Number of people using invention? Contribution to software construction?
Sergey Brin might have invented Google, but his effect on the software world is a bit indirect.
As computers solve more and more difficult problems (beating humans at chess, learning to filter spam, semi-autonomously exploring space...) we become blase with our achievements and our ambitions raise.
The problem with our progress in all of those problems, (chess, etc) that were once considered only capable of being performable by intelligent beings, is not that we become blase about them. Its that solving them hasn't brought us (much) closer to truly general intelligence. We have the algorithms to create the best chess-playing entity in the world, but the chess-playing machine can't do anything but play chess. Try and get it to filter spam, and you're back at square one. We don't consider solutions to these problems to be intelligent because they merely mechanically execute a single algorithm that someone intelligent thought of. The intelligence is all in the design, and none in the execution.
So I guess our difference in opinion comes from the fact that to me, a human being can also be thought of as a complicated machine. Intelligence is always an "illusion", as long as the machinery behind it is undiscovered.
i'd be happy with a convincing illusion of intelligence, regardless of how it worked. But its not going to be very convincing unless it can solve problems that it hasn't been explicitly designed to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
That the parent is currently at +5, and the grandparent at +1, speaks volumes about the people reading this story.
Are you defined by what you think of yourself or how others perceive you? Do you really think because you died with a gross income in your life of 10 million dollars, you will be remembered more than someone that only made $500,000 through their entire life?
the GP didn't suggest that you should devote your time to making money. They suggested that you should try to achieve something meaningful. And most people's self-perception is profoundly affected by their achievements, whether they like it or not.
I could be spending my time helping less fortunate people, or maybe working on an Open Source program that would benefit thousands of people. I may receive praise for such things, but what does this really do?
Your question is ridiculous, since you've just stated what those things achieve, and most people would agree that they're worthwhile objectives. What exactly do you consider worthwhile? A cure for cancer? People who hope to achieve that do not spend all of their time playing WOW.
Or, in 20 years, you can look back at the time when you played only video games. You can remember you had fun doing it, but did not accomplish anything with your life. You will have the memories of those games still, and the fun that you can while playing them.
Sure, you'll remember that you had fun, but you may also regret that you didn't spend your time more productively. Most people have goals that they'd like to achieve throughout their life, like buy a house, or achieve a certain level of education, play some kind of sport, or raise a family. Something that's nice about these goals is that, once achieved, they represent a tangible reminder of your effort, and that the skills required to accomplish them can help you in other areas in your life. In most cases, they'll also raise your quality of life, and allow you to do things that you otherwise couldn't. Playing WOW doesn't seem to advance you toward any of those things. Once you walk away from your computer, you are no better off than when you started. 20 years down the track, you may want a house, wife, job, or degree, and wonder why you played games instead of trying to achieve them.
You're ignoring the idea that maybe, if you use your time wisely, you can play games and achieve other things. No-one is suggesting that you can't take time out to have some fun sometimes. If you start trying to achieve something, you might also discover that things other than video games are fun too! (Shocking, i know.)
Some people feel that they have to help others, and do things beneficial to society, so they can be defined by society as being a productive member. And the only way they can satisfy themselves is to think that what they've done with their lives has made a difference (no matter if it really did or not).
Things that are other people admire are typically things that they'd like to achieve themselves. The point of being productive is not to gain other people's good opinion, but to satisfy your goals in life.
Just because you think something is wrong, doesn't mean it is. Even if laws say that something is wrong, doesn't mean it is. I feel that psychology hasn't fully caught up with the concepts of MMOs, so they tend to be compared to drugs or other bad addictions.
This is getting off-topic, but what exactly is wrong, then? Also, I think psychology is precisely right in comparing MMOs to drugs, in that using them is a lot of fun, but ultimately pointless. The tragedy of bad addictions is that you waste your life on pointless activities, when you could have been doing something worthwhile.
The truest cause of anti-intellectualism is the anti-religion movement
Firstly, you shouldn't equate your feelings regarding truth with those of the 'anti-religion' movement. I highly doubt that many of them feel that truth isn't important without belief in god.
Why truth?
This is a difficult question, because truth is generally accepted as being good in and of itself, even without reference to god. Fortunately, however, science goes even further, in requiring theories that are falsifiable. This means that theories have to have a demonstrable effect on the real world for them to be accepted as sound. So the answer to your question as to why you should care for (scientific) truth is that you can use it to have an effect on the real world. For example, you can build a house that doesn't fall down as a result of scientific truth in physics. And if that isn't enough justification for you, i don't think anyone can help you.
It's amazing and somwhat sad that programming languages and runtime environments from Smalltalk to Java to Python to C#/.NET keep reinventing the wheel while a language from the 1950s has the most advanced form of rabid language advocacy yet - smug lisp weenies
A "Computer Scientist" is a mathematician specializing in an obscure branch of mathematics. There is no "science" involved.
Describing computer science as maths is like trying to pass off biology as physics. Certainly at some level everything in computer science can be described by maths, (and in certain areas it is just maths) but in many cases the level of abstraction is so high that it's impossible to analyse it. Hence the science.
While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page
The problem with bringing a cognitive search engine to market is that no-one has invented a cognitive anything, let alone a useful search engine. Cyc has been around for a long time, and has been used in search engine tasks, and hasn't done much. That should tell you how successful that kind of approach is. I assure you that the big 3 of search would bring out cognitive search if they could. Meanwhile, information retrieval hueristics with no pretensions to intelligence continue to do the job in a surprisingly robust way.
and i think you forgot to add and a pony too.
Ok, so the Chinese don't think democracy is a basic human right since they don't have democracy. Have you considered the possibility that political dissenters tend to disappear in China? Or get run over by tanks? Perhaps at this time life is good enough in China that they are not willing to risk prosperity by having a violent revolution. But that doesn't mean the Chinese don't value democracy.
Well, you're right in that the chinese government could be supressing democracy (and has in certain events in the past). However, supressing people who want to change government styles is hardly unique to china, or even to non-democratic governments. Irregardless, the chinese do not seem to value democracy as highly as western societies, and its their right to make up their own minds.
Basically, I think democracy must be a natural desire of everyone; those that truly believe that they should be ordered around their whole lives have had the human spirit bred out of them, sadly. The desire to mold your destiny is simply human instict.
i agree that the desire to influence your own destiny is natural and widespread, but i don't think that everybody agrees that democracy is the best way to achieve it. I don't care to argue about my opinions one way or the other, but i'm trying to point out that the chinese have the right to organise themselves in whatever government style they choose, without you passing moral judgement on them or accusing them of being sheep.
My suspicion is that you are reacting to the war in Iraq; specifically, you believe that if you support the creation of democracies worldwide, then you support the war in Iraq by extension. If that's the case, then it's pretty disenginous of you.
the war in Iraq couldn't have been further from my mind, and please don't accuse me of being disenginous based on conjecture.
You have drastically misunderstood his ideas. His idea of freedom is not that people in his culture should be free - it is ALL people have the RIGHT to be free. He might be wrong, but that is his idea. He believes that the Chinese people that disagree are wrong. He has the right to believe they are wrong.
i don't think i've misunderstood him. He (She? Can i assume that 'Crow T. Trollbot' is male?) has the right to hold whatever beliefs he wants, but he suggested that they're universally applicable. I have no problems with people stating their beliefs, but arrogance starts when you suggest that other people's beliefs are wrong.
You are proudly, arrogantly proclaiming your belief that he is wrong, freedom is not an actual, universal truth, it is just a cultural thing.
No, i'm not. i didn't say anything about my views on 'freedom', (once again, freedom to do what?) i just pointed out that beyond things that we do hold as universal human rights, he shouldn't try to apply his personal moral standards to china when the people there clearly have different beliefs.
Freedom is not an incompatable world view.
Democracy is not an incompatable world view.
thats a very nice speech, but you've managed to miss the point in the same way as the original submitter. YOU (unless you're a citizen of china, which i doubt) are not in a position to tell China what rights to grant its citizens. Its blatantly obvious that they don't think democracy is a basic human right, since they have an at-best quasi-elected government. 'Freedom' doesn't even have any meaning without context - freedom to what? Even in countries that place high value on individual rights, like the US, there's tension between the rights of the individual and the rights of the larger society.
The ideas themselves are no more alien to China...
its very arrogant to suggest that your ideas are the only true beliefs and that those that don't follow them need to be liberated. And try not to speak on behalf of more than a billion people next time, OK?
The first post nailed this stupid article with a stake through the heart.
I think the point of the article was that companies are attempting to influence a group of people whom the technical community look up to. If free samples are to be given, then it's natural to pick an 'elite' to give them to.
While, as others have pointed out, this kind of thing is hardly new, it's disappointing to see commercial interests attempt to bias the information that we recieve even further than it already is. While other instances of free samples have some justification, (for example, reviewers shouldn't have to purchase products that they write about) the fact that they recieve free goods/services should be disclosed and makes me trust the review less than completely unbiased sources. Its not that i think the reviewers are in the pockets of the companies whose products they write about, it's that they are no longer in a position to be completely objective.
The disturbing thing about this silicon valley 100 is they're attempting to influence word-of-mouth style information by giving goods to a selected group of people who have no professional reason to require them. The whole set-up is to try to influence a source of information, word-of-mouth, that we have traditionally trusted as being completely unbiased. If someone recommends a product in passing conversation without further discussion you assume that they have no connection with the product involved, and that they're merely giving you some good advice. In a similar fashion to before, i don't think these people, having recieved free products, are in a position to give unbiased good advice anymore. Although most people won't know this, and i doubt that the 100 are going to start prefixing their discussions with 'i'm not completly unbiased about this, but...'.
So i think that the 100 should refuse the products, otherwise they're abusing the trust of the people they discuss those products with. Way to drag our ethical standards just that little bit lower...
So please enlighten us. How is limiting access to the internet to a reasonable amount of time (depending on the PARENT's standards/values/beliefs) not treating them like human beings?
limiting the amount of time spent on the net is a perfectly reasonable parental thing to do, even used as a carrot. However, the grandparent mentioned non-technical alternatives. As in, instead of having a router automatically determine that they've used their X hours of net time for the day and shut them down, you suggest to them that X hours of net time a day is a reasonable limit and you expect them not to go over it. Learning how to follow limits that aren't immediatly enforced is an important lesson. Telling your kids what to do works for some situations, but they're going to have to learn to control themselves to be effective adults. And kids (rightfully) resent having their lives controlled by someone else if you clamp down too hard.
I originally posted this in google groups, but I feel I need to post it here as well
apparently you feel the need to post it repeatedly.
You don't like GDS. We get the point.
With all due respect to de Icaza, i think that the grandparent has a point (even if they put it a bit abrasively). Putting de Icaza on a list of software giants that includes K&R, Turing and Stallman doesn't feel right to me.
However, i think that this list is doomed to be meaningless anyway, because they haven't given any criteria as to what makes a software giant. Commercial success? Number of people using invention? Contribution to software construction? Sergey Brin might have invented Google, but his effect on the software world is a bit indirect.
Oh, and they need less irritating advertising.
As computers solve more and more difficult problems (beating humans at chess, learning to filter spam, semi-autonomously exploring space...) we become blase with our achievements and our ambitions raise.
The problem with our progress in all of those problems, (chess, etc) that were once considered only capable of being performable by intelligent beings, is not that we become blase about them. Its that solving them hasn't brought us (much) closer to truly general intelligence. We have the algorithms to create the best chess-playing entity in the world, but the chess-playing machine can't do anything but play chess. Try and get it to filter spam, and you're back at square one. We don't consider solutions to these problems to be intelligent because they merely mechanically execute a single algorithm that someone intelligent thought of. The intelligence is all in the design, and none in the execution.
So I guess our difference in opinion comes from the fact that to me, a human being can also be thought of as a complicated machine. Intelligence is always an "illusion", as long as the machinery behind it is undiscovered.
i'd be happy with a convincing illusion of intelligence, regardless of how it worked. But its not going to be very convincing unless it can solve problems that it hasn't been explicitly designed to handle.
because the true path to wisdom lies through slashdot
;o)
high UID, and proud of it