It appears there are two classes of home-schoolings. I still don't understand the one you mention, because that would mean that there are no good schools available. I know selecting a good school is one of the challenges of parenthood, but I can't imagine not being able to find one. Might be an american problem, though. Your schools are rather different from european schools, for example.
A few more miles down the road, and we won't be even able to write our own open-source apps anymore.
Total non-sequitur. You are aware of the immense number of iPhone apps available, are you?
[Linux] could bring uniformity of interfaces to all our devices.
Errr... ok, it's been a few years since I did Linux kernel stuff and worked a bit on the Gnome thing, but last I checked, "uniformity", especially of interfaces and Linux are thrice removed cousins that don't talk to each other, not brother and sister.
I like Linux, and I use it a lot. But like "free market", "communism" or "the constitution", it is not a magic word that solves every problem of mankind. When it comes to versatility and getting things done the "made with my own hands" way, Linux it is. But when it comes to good user interface design and interaction, Linux doesn't even play in the same league as most of the Apple stuff. Sorry, that's the way it is.
You don't recall the recent refusal of the google voice application from the app store?
To be anti-competitive, you have to have a monopoly or stranglehold on the market first. You can all this behaviour anything else you want, but until Apple is a monopolist, it isn't anti-competitive.
Further, I don't like apple being in charge of selling all the apps for their platform.
That's ok. "I don't like" is a statement of personal preference and you're entitled to that. I just objected to the "anti-competitive" which is a statement of fact, and in this case false to the facts.
You misappropriate the term "defective by design".
"Does not contain the features I desire" is not "defective by design".
Why don't they allow us to run multiple applications at once on the iphone and ipad, for example?
On the iPhone, due to hardware restrictions mostly. I know a little about that, I happen to be an iPhone developer. While the device is able to multi-task (and does it to a degree), I am very, very happy that it doesn't allow apps to do that. Because if it did, people would have a random number of background tasks, and on that device you simply don't have the spare ressources to ignore that. Besides, the small screen makes actual simultaneous applications impractical anyways.
If you don't know that restrictions are as much part of design as features, you need to read up on design. There's a great speech about simplicity and the tyranny of choice over on TED, I can recommend it.
Because it ruins the user experience for the average user, and this could give apple a bad rep. As a consumer i do not want to be treated like that.
Ah, you want your experience to be ruined? Not a problem, buy Microsoft, they have a guarantee on that part.:-)
Computing devices should be open, and there should be rules for that.
Why?
I'm serious. Give me a good reason apart from "because I want it".
And when you do so, please do consider that these days, practically everything aside from food and clothes has microchips inside, and could be considered a "computing device".
In fact, if microsoft pulled apple's anti-competitive tricks, then they would be sanctioned by the EU before they saw it coming.
You may not like it and I do in fact sympathize (not being able to install arbitrary software except through the App Store is one of the reasons I'll very likely not be getting an iPad) - but whatever you want to call it in your anger, I fail to see where it has anything to do with anti-competitiveness.
Religion is, first and foremost, about examining things. To say otherwise is the sign of ignorance, not insight.
You desperately need to read some accounts on the evolution of religion. The roots of religion was to give answers to (at their times) unanswerable questions. It is a replacement of examination, and that's why religion and education don't merge, because a proper education makes you a) question things and b) teaches you how to find out the facts, independent of what people say.
And language is not just any topic. Due to the close interrelation between language and thoughts, one could go so far as to say that language skills are thinking skills.
There are many people in religions that do not understand them. There are many poor excuses for religion-- more akin to cults than religions. Has our society become so jaded, so ill informed that we cannot tell the difference?
I fear the opposite is true. Our society has come far enough to look behind the curtains and realize that there is no difference between cults and religions, and that "cult" is only the deragotary term that the successful, large religions apply to the less successful smaller ones. They all have one thing in common that doesn't work well with education, and that's that they think they have the ultimate answer. Usually not explicitly, but in the form of a deus ex machine (pun not intended). They may admit that they don't know why this or that, but that they do know it's because of (insert deity of choice here)'s master plan.
Do you think the Dali Llama and Pat Robertson are on the same level of critical thinking? Do you feel that the Catholic Church and the Born Again Christians are the same? Do you think that examination of our selves, or minds as opposed to our surroundings is somehow less important? That the urge to understand our humanity is less important than understanding the stars?
No, but they do share common traits. Yes, with unimportant differences. No, but religion doesn't examine the minds. If it did, how come we entered the Enlightenment after thousands of years of uninterrupted and unchallenged religious rule knowing virtually nothing about it? No, but again religion does not try to understand our humanity, or why else - again - did the past 200 or so years of actually trying to understand human motivations, societies, etc. turned up the body of knowledge we have today and what little was thought to be true before that turned up to be largely nonsense on close inspection?
Frankly, if religion had any claim whatsoever on knowledge, examination and understanding, you'd think that, say, 2000 years of christianity would have to show something for it that at least compares somewhat to what actual knowledge, examination and understanding have turned up in about 200 years? When you're down more than 10:1, it's time you don't know shit. And if you don't know shit, it's time you get out of education, because you have nothing to teach.
Woeful is the world which places plants above people-- though we must strive to understand both.
I think you just qualified for the non-sequitur of the year.:-)
Catholic theology includes a number of conditions which, if true, refute the Catholic religion -- two contradictory infallible statements being the most obvious case.
Really? Why am I so sure that if that were ever to happen, there'd be an "interpretation" to solve the problem? Just like the Jehova's Witnesses had not trouble at all changing the date on the "certain" end of the world, several times?
And yes, I would lumb communism and fascism into the "religion" (or, if you insist on details, belief-system) corner, because they do not contain conditions for falsification.
But, aside from details, yes the iPad is not a DIY kit. Nevertheless, it allows you to tinker with it a lot more than 99% of the other things in your life, like your car, or microwave oven, none of which were built for tinkering, either. It comes with the maturity of the thing, the first cars were large DIY (or rather, repair-it-yourself) as were the first IC boards, and look where we've got, not many of the nerds in here complain that the latest Intel CPU comes enclosed and they can't re-wire it anymore.
Teaching is simply not a profession that attracts the best minds, for a mixture of reasons that mostly involve its relatively low status, relatively low pay, and poor working conditions (K-12 education is as much babysitting as teaching).
Which, incidentally, is the point where any serious effort to improve education has to begin. Everything else, whether it's called "no child left behind" or "fuck 'em all" will work without addressing the issue that to get good education, you need good people to do the educating.
And it was not too long ago that teachers were considered to be the elite, together with the doctors and the other distinguished men of their community. So what happened? More importantly - how can we fix it?
My personal guess (and I have a sister who's a teacher and a girlfriend that is becoming one) is the babysitting part took over. Teachers today don't teach, they are replacement parents, except that they have none of the authority or options of handling that parents do.
That's assuming that the only purpose of grammar is understanding. Maybe it isn't. There is a lot of ambiguity in our language, and an unbelievable amount of implicit information. In other words: The vast majority of information that you need to understand these sentences here is not actually contained within them.
Compressing language to the highest density that still allows comprehension also has the side-effect of increasing ambiguity and reducing clarity. It works if both parties share enough implicit information that they can construct the rest, and the medium allows for immediate correction of errors. The problem is that this is not true in all circumstances, so if you make it your basic modus operandi, you set yourself up for failure in everything but texting with your friends.
There's no harm in knowing slang, or Internet shorthands, or 1337-sp34k, etc. etc. But there is in not knowing anything else.
What I do believe, based on what I know and experienced, is that organized religion has an almost schizophrenic relation to education. On the one hand, they embrace it for its obvious advantages, especially basic things like reading and writing which are required in a book-based religion like the three monotheistic ones. On the other hand they play embrace, extend, extinguish with it due to the very obvious and apparent advantages of knowledge and applied knowledge (especially technology), but they embrace it carefully, intentionally, with filters in place and with an agenda. Basically, the way way that Microsoft treats Free Software.
That is not untypical of ideologies. Communism was very strong on dialectical discourse as well. Of course with the understanding that the end result would adhere to the doctrine.
was doing it because they saw Education as being important, and felt they could do a better job then the local Public/Private school.
Hm, interesting. Every reasoning that I've read so far was always closer to "they don't teach the right (i.e. our religious) things" and much less that they don't teach well enough.
Religion ("believing in something") is considered more important than science ("examining things"). So what is the surprise in that education in general goes down the drain? The home-schooling religious right has one thing correct: Education is fundamentally hostile to religion and all the other "we already have the answers" bullshit bingo.
The biggest problem - Dawkins got that right - is that rational thinking doesn't have much of a lobby. Heck, thinking of any kind doesn't. If you can check your facts, you don't have this desire to defend them religiously. You think that if someone doubts you, he can repeat the double-blind experiment and be convinced. Except that you are the one who's double-blind - to both the fact that the religious doubters won't repeat the experiment and even if they would, it wouldn't convince them of anything. Because religion is not falsifyable, it's a reverse-falsification system: The more you disprove it, the more fanatical its believers become.
So it's inhumane to give a cold person warm shoes if you don't also give them a coat?
Actually, that goes beyond inhumane. If we're talking about a person that's dying from cold, then giving them warm shoes, knowing full well that without a warm coat they'll be dying anyway certainly is an especially devious way to ridicule them, yes.
but that doesn't make helping someone, even selfishly, inhumane.
You are right, your and my ethics don't seem to line up. If I had 10 billion, and I could make a real difference for 100,000 people or a mockery out of a million, I'll choose the 100,000 because to me, with that amount of money, it better have a positive long-term effect.
And no, I don't have the "right" answer on what's the best way to spend it is. But I'm very certain that life on the larger scales is too complex and interdependent for those simple answers. I am very sure that any single-purpose investment is at best stupid and more likely dangerous or counter-productive.
The humane thing is to either go the whole nine yards, or not do what mostly makes you feel better, not them.
Yes, sometimes that includes letting them die. Funny how we consider it humane to put a horse out of its misery when we know that due to its injuries there'll be nothing but suffering in its life, but for humans, other principles apply. Too much empathy?
You want to tinker with your iPhone or iPad? Get an Apple Developers account and you can unlock it and write any Objective-C code you want and put it on the device.
So maybe program X won't be available on the App Store, but you can easily compile and install it on your personal iPhone. Oh yeah, it takes a developer account, whine about that. But while you're whining, do agree that the statements made in the summary are simply false to fact.
You are assuming that the quality of life is such that saving people will create suffering.
Not quite. I am saying that these people are already suffering. Saving their life is what is easy and lets you feel really good and righteous. But actually improving their life is the hard thing. Which is why not many people really do it, including the Gates Foundation.
They're doing a half-assed job if they come in, vaccinate people, and then leave. Especially if, contrary to many other programs, they actually do have enough money at their disposal that they could make a difference.
But, as Melinda Gates admitted, they're interested in getting the most bang for the buck.
The Gates foundation is quite open that they are after getting the most bang for their buck - how can they have the largest impact on the human condition for their money.
The largest visible impact. A foundation needs publicity and good image. There's a lot of other things that would greatly improve the human condition. And I still think it is wrong to save people and then leave them in their state of misery. Either go the whole nine yards, or don't do it at all.
Gates isn't the devil, simply because I'm pretty sure Gates exists.:-)
No, one foundation can't solve all the problems. But it should think of the consequences of its actions. If they save 8 million lives, that means 8 million more "customers" for the work of all the other foundations, foreign aid institutions, etc. who support the rest of the lives of those people.
I say it again: None of us wants to personally suffer or die from disease. Nevertheless, underpopulation is not exactly on the list of problems this planet has to solve. Saving lives without improving the amount of life that a region can support is a stupid thing to do.
Per Melinda Gates' own words, they HAVE done the analysis I mentioned.
Per my words with a limited focus.
I'm sure the first foreign aid had done an analysis, too. Feeding that people so they don't starve certainly turned out to be the top priority. They just didn't realize that more survivors == more ressource usage == worsening of the food and water situation.
Call me ignorant in 10 years, when the Gates Foundation has saved 8 million lives, thus condemning 20 million people (their children) to suffering and early death.
You can't interfere with exponential processes (population growth) unless you're able to raise your investment exponentially.
Yes, well Gates is spending mostly his own money. The government is simply spending other people's money.
Who do you think is going to spend more wisely?
I fail to see a correlation between those two. Some people spend their own money carefully, and squander others'. Some people are careless with their own money, and very responsible with that of others. It depends on the people doing the spending, and "the government" is a lot of people, some leaning this way, some leaning that.
Last I checked, *I* can't go and write, say, a new IM application that would run in the background on an iPhone.
Correct. But you can have your app notify the user that a new message has arrived, even when it isn't running. What other background running functionality do you need in an IM application?
My examples of IM and Email are perfect examples of apps I want running in the background, alerting me of new activities.
Yepp, see above. Heck, there's even an EVE Online app that tells you when your skill training queue has dropped below 24 hours. Alerting you of stuff is available on the iPhone today, and thus will almost certainly work just the same on the iPad.
Why? Because I don't subscribe to the religion that saving life is the most holy, unquestionable good thing in existence, no matter the consequences?
I think it is evil to promote or prolong suffering. Sure, letting someone die isn't exactly nice. But let's make it more personal and less abstract. Imagine your neighbours wife is being beaten by her husband. Every day. Seriously. To the point where being beaten is roughly what her life is all about. What would you say when the Gates Foundation comes about, proclaiming that so many people die of blood loss every year and that it could all be prevented with some ointment and band aids. And they come to her house and patch her up. Real well, too. All the bruises and scratches get bandaged. And then they leave and in the evening, you hear her screams again.
Now I'm the one who says "they could've spent that money actually improving her life", and you call me a nazi?
I've met 4 who use Apple machines in all that time, two of them were American trainers on courses - yes, I'm Europe based where Macs are nowhere near as prevalent, admittedly.
Depends on the region. I'm from Germany, and Macs are so common here that I'm pretty certain their market share is way beyond the 10% you always read in the press. Or maybe I know all the weird people and none of the common ones.
I do regular maintenance on both because I don't want malware or unauthorised people getting in, I apply security updates. If you believe you can get away with not doing the same on a Mac, especially with the poor security track record of Safari, then your are delusional.
Look, I'm a computer security professional. I do OpenBSD firewalls because that's what OpenBSD is good at. My various webservers run on Linux because nothing beats Linux at that game. I dual-boot into XP because of games simply because the games selection on Mac is still so low. I've administrated everything from Win2K to HP/UX. I've hacked Linux on a Compaq iPaq and recompiled Firefox to run on a 16 MB set-top box.
And not despite but because of that background that I've chosen OS X as my desktop operating system. Less time wasted on maintainance and more time for fiddling with the stuff that I actually want to fiddle with. And that's not the core OS anymore. I've wasted way too much time writing kernel drivers for devices that weren't supported that one of those days I wondered just when that became my job, I only wanted to use the damn thing.
Therefore I tweak stuff to be how I want it - this is not "fighting" the machine, this is making it work better to how I want so I save time in future.
I call that the "Tech Control Illusion". Basically, it's fooling yourself. What you really want (that's a guess, I may be wrong) is the feeling of being in control of the machine. Common users satisfy that feeling by changing their desktop background, re-arranging their icons or installing a different sound or icon set. Power users satisfy it by replacing the default kernel with a configured and self-compiled one, or by applying "tweaks" to the system or by messing up the registry. And even us professionals aren't safe from that feeling, we hack up our custom kernel drivers, write our own window manager, replace the windos shell with Bumptop or Lightstep, etc.
At least for me, I've looked at how much additional value I really get from this "making it work better", and realized it is nowhere even near an acceptable ROI.
If you do not believe the MSI will be a competitor to iPad, then you are even more delusional. They are both tablet computing devices, Jobs himself said iPad is a "netbook killer", he himself made the comparison.
We will see. This is/. - this is where the iPod was said to certainly die a quick death. I stand by my words, there is nothing on the market at this time or announced that competes with the iPad. All those "tablet computers" are just notebooks without keyboards. The iPad isn't a general purpose portable computer - which is why lots of the techies here dislike it, because you can't do everything with it. But that exactly is its market: People who don't want or need to do "anything" with it, because let's face it, 90% of the people do exactly that subset of activities the iPad offers 90% of the time anyways.
Countries aren't poor because they are poor, they are poor because they have bad institutions and governments.
On the other hand, a group of foreigners can fly into a country and vaccinate a bunch of people and fly out.
And feel extremely smug and self-righteous about it, while having fixed none of the problems that really matter. The country is still poor, its institutions still bad, and its government still corrupt. A few people will live a year longer, create one more child than they would've otherwise, then die of a different disease, or starve, or be shot by death squad or whatever else.
What a contribution.
Philosophical question: If you save someone who would've otherwise died, and that someone lives a life of suffering, have you lessened, or added to, the amount of suffering in the world?
This foundation is not just shooting the shit on the internet to decide what to do. They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.
Having lots of money and spending it on the right things is not the same. The Gates Foundation is very focussed on health and especially diseases, it has made very few investments in other areas.
I doubt that they have done the analysis that you allude to. I really do. They wouldn't be the first. Especially the west is often a victim of hubris. Look how much money we've poured into Afghanistan and Iraq and what the result is so far. Burning it would probably have had a better net effect, at least it would've heated a number of homes.
I'm afraid the same phenomenon is at work here. The Gates Foundation "knows" that disease is the major problem, just like our warlords "know" that forcing democracy on a foreign population will magically fix all their problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the info, I'll update my opinion.
It appears there are two classes of home-schoolings. I still don't understand the one you mention, because that would mean that there are no good schools available. I know selecting a good school is one of the challenges of parenthood, but I can't imagine not being able to find one. Might be an american problem, though. Your schools are rather different from european schools, for example.
A few more miles down the road, and we won't be even able to write our own open-source apps anymore.
Total non-sequitur. You are aware of the immense number of iPhone apps available, are you?
[Linux] could bring uniformity of interfaces to all our devices.
Errr... ok, it's been a few years since I did Linux kernel stuff and worked a bit on the Gnome thing, but last I checked, "uniformity", especially of interfaces and Linux are thrice removed cousins that don't talk to each other, not brother and sister.
I like Linux, and I use it a lot. But like "free market", "communism" or "the constitution", it is not a magic word that solves every problem of mankind. When it comes to versatility and getting things done the "made with my own hands" way, Linux it is. But when it comes to good user interface design and interaction, Linux doesn't even play in the same league as most of the Apple stuff. Sorry, that's the way it is.
You don't recall the recent refusal of the google voice application from the app store?
To be anti-competitive, you have to have a monopoly or stranglehold on the market first. You can all this behaviour anything else you want, but until Apple is a monopolist, it isn't anti-competitive.
Further, I don't like apple being in charge of selling all the apps for their platform.
That's ok. "I don't like" is a statement of personal preference and you're entitled to that. I just objected to the "anti-competitive" which is a statement of fact, and in this case false to the facts.
You misappropriate the term "defective by design".
"Does not contain the features I desire" is not "defective by design".
Why don't they allow us to run multiple applications at once on the iphone and ipad, for example?
On the iPhone, due to hardware restrictions mostly. I know a little about that, I happen to be an iPhone developer. While the device is able to multi-task (and does it to a degree), I am very, very happy that it doesn't allow apps to do that. Because if it did, people would have a random number of background tasks, and on that device you simply don't have the spare ressources to ignore that. Besides, the small screen makes actual simultaneous applications impractical anyways.
If you don't know that restrictions are as much part of design as features, you need to read up on design. There's a great speech about simplicity and the tyranny of choice over on TED, I can recommend it.
Because it ruins the user experience for the average user, and this could give apple a bad rep. As a consumer i do not want to be treated like that.
Ah, you want your experience to be ruined? Not a problem, buy Microsoft, they have a guarantee on that part. :-)
Computing devices should be open, and there should be rules for that.
Why?
I'm serious. Give me a good reason apart from "because I want it".
And when you do so, please do consider that these days, practically everything aside from food and clothes has microchips inside, and could be considered a "computing device".
In fact, if microsoft pulled apple's anti-competitive tricks, then they would be sanctioned by the EU before they saw it coming.
You may not like it and I do in fact sympathize (not being able to install arbitrary software except through the App Store is one of the reasons I'll very likely not be getting an iPad) - but whatever you want to call it in your anger, I fail to see where it has anything to do with anti-competitiveness.
Religion is, first and foremost, about examining things. To say otherwise is the sign of ignorance, not insight.
You desperately need to read some accounts on the evolution of religion. The roots of religion was to give answers to (at their times) unanswerable questions. It is a replacement of examination, and that's why religion and education don't merge, because a proper education makes you a) question things and b) teaches you how to find out the facts, independent of what people say.
And language is not just any topic. Due to the close interrelation between language and thoughts, one could go so far as to say that language skills are thinking skills.
There are many people in religions that do not understand them. There are many poor excuses for religion-- more akin to cults than religions. Has our society become so jaded, so ill informed that we cannot tell the difference?
I fear the opposite is true. Our society has come far enough to look behind the curtains and realize that there is no difference between cults and religions, and that "cult" is only the deragotary term that the successful, large religions apply to the less successful smaller ones. They all have one thing in common that doesn't work well with education, and that's that they think they have the ultimate answer. Usually not explicitly, but in the form of a deus ex machine (pun not intended). They may admit that they don't know why this or that, but that they do know it's because of (insert deity of choice here)'s master plan.
Do you think the Dali Llama and Pat Robertson are on the same level of critical thinking? Do you feel that the Catholic Church and the Born Again Christians are the same? Do you think that examination of our selves, or minds as opposed to our surroundings is somehow less important? That the urge to understand our humanity is less important than understanding the stars?
No, but they do share common traits.
Yes, with unimportant differences.
No, but religion doesn't examine the minds. If it did, how come we entered the Enlightenment after thousands of years of uninterrupted and unchallenged religious rule knowing virtually nothing about it?
No, but again religion does not try to understand our humanity, or why else - again - did the past 200 or so years of actually trying to understand human motivations, societies, etc. turned up the body of knowledge we have today and what little was thought to be true before that turned up to be largely nonsense on close inspection?
Frankly, if religion had any claim whatsoever on knowledge, examination and understanding, you'd think that, say, 2000 years of christianity would have to show something for it that at least compares somewhat to what actual knowledge, examination and understanding have turned up in about 200 years? When you're down more than 10:1, it's time you don't know shit. And if you don't know shit, it's time you get out of education, because you have nothing to teach.
Woeful is the world which places plants above people-- though we must strive to understand both.
I think you just qualified for the non-sequitur of the year. :-)
Catholic theology includes a number of conditions which, if true, refute the Catholic religion -- two contradictory infallible statements being the most obvious case.
Really? Why am I so sure that if that were ever to happen, there'd be an "interpretation" to solve the problem? Just like the Jehova's Witnesses had not trouble at all changing the date on the "certain" end of the world, several times?
And yes, I would lumb communism and fascism into the "religion" (or, if you insist on details, belief-system) corner, because they do not contain conditions for falsification.
Well, in my definition of "tinkering", you should have access to the privileged parts of the cpu.
Merriam Webster respectfully disagrees.
But, aside from details, yes the iPad is not a DIY kit. Nevertheless, it allows you to tinker with it a lot more than 99% of the other things in your life, like your car, or microwave oven, none of which were built for tinkering, either. It comes with the maturity of the thing, the first cars were large DIY (or rather, repair-it-yourself) as were the first IC boards, and look where we've got, not many of the nerds in here complain that the latest Intel CPU comes enclosed and they can't re-wire it anymore.
Teaching is simply not a profession that attracts the best minds, for a mixture of reasons that mostly involve its relatively low status, relatively low pay, and poor working conditions (K-12 education is as much babysitting as teaching).
Which, incidentally, is the point where any serious effort to improve education has to begin. Everything else, whether it's called "no child left behind" or "fuck 'em all" will work without addressing the issue that to get good education, you need good people to do the educating.
And it was not too long ago that teachers were considered to be the elite, together with the doctors and the other distinguished men of their community. So what happened? More importantly - how can we fix it?
My personal guess (and I have a sister who's a teacher and a girlfriend that is becoming one) is the babysitting part took over. Teachers today don't teach, they are replacement parents, except that they have none of the authority or options of handling that parents do.
That's assuming that the only purpose of grammar is understanding. Maybe it isn't. There is a lot of ambiguity in our language, and an unbelievable amount of implicit information. In other words: The vast majority of information that you need to understand these sentences here is not actually contained within them.
Compressing language to the highest density that still allows comprehension also has the side-effect of increasing ambiguity and reducing clarity. It works if both parties share enough implicit information that they can construct the rest, and the medium allows for immediate correction of errors. The problem is that this is not true in all circumstances, so if you make it your basic modus operandi, you set yourself up for failure in everything but texting with your friends.
There's no harm in knowing slang, or Internet shorthands, or 1337-sp34k, etc. etc. But there is in not knowing anything else.
No, and not due to that reason.
What I do believe, based on what I know and experienced, is that organized religion has an almost schizophrenic relation to education. On the one hand, they embrace it for its obvious advantages, especially basic things like reading and writing which are required in a book-based religion like the three monotheistic ones. On the other hand they play embrace, extend, extinguish with it due to the very obvious and apparent advantages of knowledge and applied knowledge (especially technology), but they embrace it carefully, intentionally, with filters in place and with an agenda. Basically, the way way that Microsoft treats Free Software.
That is not untypical of ideologies. Communism was very strong on dialectical discourse as well. Of course with the understanding that the end result would adhere to the doctrine.
was doing it because they saw Education as being important, and felt they could do a better job then the local Public/Private school.
Hm, interesting. Every reasoning that I've read so far was always closer to "they don't teach the right (i.e. our religious) things" and much less that they don't teach well enough.
Religion ("believing in something") is considered more important than science ("examining things"). So what is the surprise in that education in general goes down the drain? The home-schooling religious right has one thing correct: Education is fundamentally hostile to religion and all the other "we already have the answers" bullshit bingo.
The biggest problem - Dawkins got that right - is that rational thinking doesn't have much of a lobby. Heck, thinking of any kind doesn't. If you can check your facts, you don't have this desire to defend them religiously. You think that if someone doubts you, he can repeat the double-blind experiment and be convinced. Except that you are the one who's double-blind - to both the fact that the religious doubters won't repeat the experiment and even if they would, it wouldn't convince them of anything. Because religion is not falsifyable, it's a reverse-falsification system: The more you disprove it, the more fanatical its believers become.
So it's inhumane to give a cold person warm shoes if you don't also give them a coat?
Actually, that goes beyond inhumane. If we're talking about a person that's dying from cold, then giving them warm shoes, knowing full well that without a warm coat they'll be dying anyway certainly is an especially devious way to ridicule them, yes.
but that doesn't make helping someone, even selfishly, inhumane.
You are right, your and my ethics don't seem to line up. If I had 10 billion, and I could make a real difference for 100,000 people or a mockery out of a million, I'll choose the 100,000 because to me, with that amount of money, it better have a positive long-term effect.
And no, I don't have the "right" answer on what's the best way to spend it is. But I'm very certain that life on the larger scales is too complex and interdependent for those simple answers. I am very sure that any single-purpose investment is at best stupid and more likely dangerous or counter-productive.
Because "tinkering" requires Linux and anything not Linux doesn't count?
So the humane thing to do is to let them die?
The humane thing is to either go the whole nine yards, or not do what mostly makes you feel better, not them.
Yes, sometimes that includes letting them die. Funny how we consider it humane to put a horse out of its misery when we know that due to its injuries there'll be nothing but suffering in its life, but for humans, other principles apply. Too much empathy?
You want to tinker with your iPhone or iPad? Get an Apple Developers account and you can unlock it and write any Objective-C code you want and put it on the device.
So maybe program X won't be available on the App Store, but you can easily compile and install it on your personal iPhone. Oh yeah, it takes a developer account, whine about that. But while you're whining, do agree that the statements made in the summary are simply false to fact.
You are assuming that the quality of life is such that saving people will create suffering.
Not quite. I am saying that these people are already suffering. Saving their life is what is easy and lets you feel really good and righteous. But actually improving their life is the hard thing. Which is why not many people really do it, including the Gates Foundation.
They're doing a half-assed job if they come in, vaccinate people, and then leave. Especially if, contrary to many other programs, they actually do have enough money at their disposal that they could make a difference.
But, as Melinda Gates admitted, they're interested in getting the most bang for the buck.
The Gates foundation is quite open that they are after getting the most bang for their buck - how can they have the largest impact on the human condition for their money.
The largest visible impact. A foundation needs publicity and good image. There's a lot of other things that would greatly improve the human condition. And I still think it is wrong to save people and then leave them in their state of misery. Either go the whole nine yards, or don't do it at all.
Gates isn't the devil, simply because I'm pretty sure Gates exists. :-)
No, one foundation can't solve all the problems. But it should think of the consequences of its actions. If they save 8 million lives, that means 8 million more "customers" for the work of all the other foundations, foreign aid institutions, etc. who support the rest of the lives of those people.
I say it again: None of us wants to personally suffer or die from disease. Nevertheless, underpopulation is not exactly on the list of problems this planet has to solve. Saving lives without improving the amount of life that a region can support is a stupid thing to do.
Per Melinda Gates' own words, they HAVE done the analysis I mentioned.
Per my words with a limited focus.
I'm sure the first foreign aid had done an analysis, too. Feeding that people so they don't starve certainly turned out to be the top priority. They just didn't realize that more survivors == more ressource usage == worsening of the food and water situation.
Call me ignorant in 10 years, when the Gates Foundation has saved 8 million lives, thus condemning 20 million people (their children) to suffering and early death.
You can't interfere with exponential processes (population growth) unless you're able to raise your investment exponentially.
Yes, well Gates is spending mostly his own money. The government is simply spending other people's money.
Who do you think is going to spend more wisely?
I fail to see a correlation between those two. Some people spend their own money carefully, and squander others'. Some people are careless with their own money, and very responsible with that of others. It depends on the people doing the spending, and "the government" is a lot of people, some leaning this way, some leaning that.
Last I checked, *I* can't go and write, say, a new IM application that would run in the background on an iPhone.
Correct. But you can have your app notify the user that a new message has arrived, even when it isn't running. What other background running functionality do you need in an IM application?
My examples of IM and Email are perfect examples of apps I want running in the background, alerting me of new activities.
Yepp, see above. Heck, there's even an EVE Online app that tells you when your skill training queue has dropped below 24 hours. Alerting you of stuff is available on the iPhone today, and thus will almost certainly work just the same on the iPad.
Why? Because I don't subscribe to the religion that saving life is the most holy, unquestionable good thing in existence, no matter the consequences?
I think it is evil to promote or prolong suffering. Sure, letting someone die isn't exactly nice. But let's make it more personal and less abstract. Imagine your neighbours wife is being beaten by her husband. Every day. Seriously. To the point where being beaten is roughly what her life is all about.
What would you say when the Gates Foundation comes about, proclaiming that so many people die of blood loss every year and that it could all be prevented with some ointment and band aids. And they come to her house and patch her up. Real well, too. All the bruises and scratches get bandaged. And then they leave and in the evening, you hear her screams again.
Now I'm the one who says "they could've spent that money actually improving her life", and you call me a nazi?
I've met 4 who use Apple machines in all that time, two of them were American trainers on courses - yes, I'm Europe based where Macs are nowhere near as prevalent, admittedly.
Depends on the region. I'm from Germany, and Macs are so common here that I'm pretty certain their market share is way beyond the 10% you always read in the press. Or maybe I know all the weird people and none of the common ones.
I do regular maintenance on both because I don't want malware or unauthorised people getting in, I apply security updates. If you believe you can get away with not doing the same on a Mac, especially with the poor security track record of Safari, then your are delusional.
Look, I'm a computer security professional. I do OpenBSD firewalls because that's what OpenBSD is good at. My various webservers run on Linux because nothing beats Linux at that game. I dual-boot into XP because of games simply because the games selection on Mac is still so low. I've administrated everything from Win2K to HP/UX. I've hacked Linux on a Compaq iPaq and recompiled Firefox to run on a 16 MB set-top box.
And not despite but because of that background that I've chosen OS X as my desktop operating system. Less time wasted on maintainance and more time for fiddling with the stuff that I actually want to fiddle with. And that's not the core OS anymore. I've wasted way too much time writing kernel drivers for devices that weren't supported that one of those days I wondered just when that became my job, I only wanted to use the damn thing.
Therefore I tweak stuff to be how I want it - this is not "fighting" the machine, this is making it work better to how I want so I save time in future.
I call that the "Tech Control Illusion". Basically, it's fooling yourself. What you really want (that's a guess, I may be wrong) is the feeling of being in control of the machine. Common users satisfy that feeling by changing their desktop background, re-arranging their icons or installing a different sound or icon set. Power users satisfy it by replacing the default kernel with a configured and self-compiled one, or by applying "tweaks" to the system or by messing up the registry. And even us professionals aren't safe from that feeling, we hack up our custom kernel drivers, write our own window manager, replace the windos shell with Bumptop or Lightstep, etc.
At least for me, I've looked at how much additional value I really get from this "making it work better", and realized it is nowhere even near an acceptable ROI.
If you do not believe the MSI will be a competitor to iPad, then you are even more delusional. They are both tablet computing devices, Jobs himself said iPad is a "netbook killer", he himself made the comparison.
We will see. This is /. - this is where the iPod was said to certainly die a quick death. I stand by my words, there is nothing on the market at this time or announced that competes with the iPad. All those "tablet computers" are just notebooks without keyboards. The iPad isn't a general purpose portable computer - which is why lots of the techies here dislike it, because you can't do everything with it. But that exactly is its market: People who don't want or need to do "anything" with it, because let's face it, 90% of the people do exactly that subset of activities the iPad offers 90% of the time anyways.
Countries aren't poor because they are poor, they are poor because they have bad institutions and governments.
On the other hand, a group of foreigners can fly into a country and vaccinate a bunch of people and fly out.
And feel extremely smug and self-righteous about it, while having fixed none of the problems that really matter. The country is still poor, its institutions still bad, and its government still corrupt. A few people will live a year longer, create one more child than they would've otherwise, then die of a different disease, or starve, or be shot by death squad or whatever else.
What a contribution.
Philosophical question: If you save someone who would've otherwise died, and that someone lives a life of suffering, have you lessened, or added to, the amount of suffering in the world?
This foundation is not just shooting the shit on the internet to decide what to do. They have Mr. Gates' and Mr. Buffett's personal fortunes going into analyzing how to do the most good in the world.
Having lots of money and spending it on the right things is not the same. The Gates Foundation is very focussed on health and especially diseases, it has made very few investments in other areas.
I doubt that they have done the analysis that you allude to. I really do. They wouldn't be the first. Especially the west is often a victim of hubris. Look how much money we've poured into Afghanistan and Iraq and what the result is so far. Burning it would probably have had a better net effect, at least it would've heated a number of homes.
I'm afraid the same phenomenon is at work here. The Gates Foundation "knows" that disease is the major problem, just like our warlords "know" that forcing democracy on a foreign population will magically fix all their problems.