Some day, I hope people will look back at this part of US history and say, "you know, at one time, the citizens of America didn't have a problem with the idea that gay people weren't allowed to get married."
Both countries have rich and deep histories of democratic values.
Where is this coming from? The wealthy? Have they "won the game" and now want to lock it in?
My sense of it is that Americans and Brits share very middle-class, and particularly lower-middle-class, sensibilities, which have always emphasized security over freedom, and have cultivated very risk-averse values in those spheres where they feel their comfortable lifestyles could be threatened. Your average householder is frankly terrified not just of the outside world, but of their own neighbors.
One thing that the English and Americans seem to share (and I have lived in both places - and, importantly, elsewhere) is that they both place more faith in material wealth than on interpersonal networks. They trust money: they don't trust each other. Community, extended family all break down - what matters is your mortgaged home and your portfolio. In Latin America (where I've also lived) what matters are your social networks: after all, your life savings could disappear in one burst of hyperinflation. The result is that, for all the problems in those places, they are much less obsessed with their own security.
Demonstrations used to be effective because they were often followed up with insurrections and revolutions. They've been domesticated into a kind of catharsis for disaffected young people, a quasi-political theater that means little and achieves nothing.
Excellent summary. Wish it weren't true, but it is. It's another victim of Google's horrible attention span. They get a clever idea, and then ask the rest of us to imagine it working well, because they can't be bothered to actually get it to work.
(If I were a fanboy about anything - and for me, that's like saying "if I were a necrophile about any species...") I might pass as something of a Google fan, so this is tough-love on my part. They spread themselves way too thin. They need to focus as much on making their products truly competitive, rather than simply interesting.
Google Docs is useful as a collaborative text editor. Almost everything else about it - particularly formatting - gets broken much too often. I've been trying, earnestly, to use it for academic writing, and the results have been ridiculous: as in, depending on what browser I use, wordwrap may not work; internal links don't work; fonts change from time to time, etc.
Ballmer is correct in noting (which, since noone RTFA, I should note contradicts the badly written summary) that Google Apps is not something that is worrying them: Open Office is. I would love Google Docs to step up, but it definitely has not, and seems to be trapped in the Google perpetual beta limbo.
Your observation above is also a fantastic example of how public-sector projects can be freer than market-based solutions. In other words, it refutes hard libertarianism.
The fact that I can walk freely along the beach is another refutation of libertarianism.
Ownership is less clear-cut than you are making it, because virtual worlds introduce the idea of virtual labor. In some ways, it is as if you were being paid in factory scrip. Virtual worlds have introduced a new category of activity: play-labor, which acts a lot like regular labor, even though it occurs in the context of leisure. That's why there's markets for virtual-world currency.
China has generally decided that you have first dibs on the rights of the product of your labor, even if its virtual labor in a virtual world. There are limits to the rights you can give up even in a contractual setting: you can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't legally work for less than minimum wage. Blizzard wants the Chinese markets, so they, too, have to agree to the terms to "play" there.
Moving to a multi-process model is the other reason. It makes it a lot more attractive to use web-based application (e.g., Google Docs) if the process is isolated.
This is correct. There is a menu item to the right of the address bar on Chrome that lets you save a site as a stand-alone application. Site-specific browsers blur the line between application and site, and Chrome is really about Gears and SSBs.
It is definitely still beta (and I wish that Google would 1. get clearer on what a "beta" is and not use it to describe a range of circumstances from fresh-out-of-the-lab-and-will-probably-explode-if-you-move-it-too-quickly to people-have-been-using-this-for-4-years-and-we're-marketing-it-as-a-solution, and 2. stop abandoning some of its beta products without a clear roadmap.)
In my case, "anyone" includes the people who walk behind my desk when I start working, the little old lady who sits next to me when I commute to work, and most dangerously, my wife.
I consider it no more or less appropriate to introduce a teaching element to IT as I think it is to introduce it to academic medicine - which is to say, never as a cost-cutting measure or to let people learn by mistakes. If CS departments are interested in sponsoring internships in addition to a professionalized IT staff, that's fine and well. I definitely would not want to have research in biochemistry, philosophy, physics, linguistics et al compromised because a production server went down over the weekend, and the 3nd year CS undergrad in charge of it didn't know what to do (or was too busy studying for midterms to do it.) I've seen this sort of thing happen at campuses - and its driven off important research.
No library I know of is "run" by the English department. There are some entry-level work-study jobs which are staffed by English majors. Having a CS undergrad supervise a computer lab or do other intern-level tasks is fine.
Your pedagogy stops at my research lab's needs. (I'm assuming an R1 institution - a T1 university may not have research to jeopardize.)
I am fond of Google-based solutions, but I think it bears noting that both Gmail and Google Docs are still tagged as "beta" by Google. I don't know if it's because they have impossibly high standard for a release, or because the "beta" flag indemnifies them, but at the end of the day, you'd still be hitching your star on something that the vendor has technically described as not completely ready for prime-time.
Don't. The CS department is interested in education and research. They may come up with an innovative solution and write a few papers about it - then abandon it, leaving it with poor documentation, a bad interface, hundreds of bugs, and idiosyncratic and non-standard elements.
IT is not CS. IT is a service.CS is a discipline. Asking the CS department to run the academic IT systems is like asking the English department to run the library. It's a non-starter.
Before the age of two, it is best that they get exposed to almost no screen media whatsover: television, computer, videogames, etc. There is too much important cognitive development going on, particularly with regard to attention, spatial cognition, sensorimotor develop - that the screen can screw up. (No, the baby seeing something on a screen for 10 minutes won't be a disaster... but it shouldn't be part of the child's regular environment.)
The whole "Baby Einstein" con is pretty much a way that busy parents assuage their guilt for using the television as a babysitter by letting themselves be convinced that it's helping them developmentally. Before age 2, it isn't.
The real culprit is the breakdown of extended families and neighborhoods: two people is barely enough to raise a child well, and if one or, God forbid, both are working, there will be some consequences for either the child's development, the parents' well-being, or both. The real solution is grandparents, aunts/uncles, close friends, parenting circles/groups, etc.
You also don't know how time-consuming your/i> kid is going to be until he/she arrives. Some are very low maintenance. Others aren't.
Ever since I have had a kid, I've learned how all the pontifications about parenting from people who don't actually have kids are generally as absurd, ignorant, and ridiculous as the thoughts of an Amish farmer about videogame consoles.
What I think is funny is when single and childless people on one hand admonish people for having children, and then turn around and wonder why their beliefs and values are becoming such a minoritarian stance. Ideologies that are hostile to childrearing are self-defeating.
The irony of the Wall Street bail-out is that it has made common cause between leftists and libertarians on economic policy.
It demonstrates something the Lenin once said, reflecting on the French revolution: that the bourgeois become utterly ruthless when their interests are threatened. The middle classes in America are willing to create an unholy alliance of Wall Street and Washington to protect their credit-fueled lifestyles, soaking future generations in order to give the wealthiest more money to lend them. This is much closer to Fascism, with a consumer-debt twist, than any of the maneuvers of the social conservatives of the past 30 years - and it has the support of about 60 percent of the populace.
I know what you're getting at. OK, OK - I'll take the job. I was reluctant, but if I have to be the God-Emperor to keep things sorted, that's just a burden I'll have to bear.
Not exactly. More like, I was willing to trade off the design benefits of the iPhone and its strong showing in applications for openness and flexibility. But if that openness and flexibility is only a fraction of what I'd hoped it be, it isn't worth the trade off.
After all, if push comes to shove and I'm violation ToS anyway, I can jailbreak the iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
Some day, I hope people will look back at this part of US history and say, "you know, at one time, the citizens of America didn't have a problem with the idea that gay people weren't allowed to get married."
Those of you living in California: No on Prop. 8.
Contacting the media is definitely the best strategy: not only is this newsworthy, it should shame several agencies into action.
I just don't understand it.
Both countries have rich and deep histories of democratic values.
Where is this coming from? The wealthy? Have they "won the game" and now want to lock it in?
My sense of it is that Americans and Brits share very middle-class, and particularly lower-middle-class, sensibilities, which have always emphasized security over freedom, and have cultivated very risk-averse values in those spheres where they feel their comfortable lifestyles could be threatened. Your average householder is frankly terrified not just of the outside world, but of their own neighbors.
One thing that the English and Americans seem to share (and I have lived in both places - and, importantly, elsewhere) is that they both place more faith in material wealth than on interpersonal networks. They trust money: they don't trust each other. Community, extended family all break down - what matters is your mortgaged home and your portfolio. In Latin America (where I've also lived) what matters are your social networks: after all, your life savings could disappear in one burst of hyperinflation. The result is that, for all the problems in those places, they are much less obsessed with their own security.
Demonstrations used to be effective because they were often followed up with insurrections and revolutions. They've been domesticated into a kind of catharsis for disaffected young people, a quasi-political theater that means little and achieves nothing.
Yahoo loses money on every customer, but they make up for it in volume!
Excellent summary. Wish it weren't true, but it is. It's another victim of Google's horrible attention span. They get a clever idea, and then ask the rest of us to imagine it working well, because they can't be bothered to actually get it to work.
(If I were a fanboy about anything - and for me, that's like saying "if I were a necrophile about any species...") I might pass as something of a Google fan, so this is tough-love on my part. They spread themselves way too thin. They need to focus as much on making their products truly competitive, rather than simply interesting.
Google Docs is useful as a collaborative text editor. Almost everything else about it - particularly formatting - gets broken much too often. I've been trying, earnestly, to use it for academic writing, and the results have been ridiculous: as in, depending on what browser I use, wordwrap may not work; internal links don't work; fonts change from time to time, etc.
Ballmer is correct in noting (which, since noone RTFA, I should note contradicts the badly written summary) that Google Apps is not something that is worrying them: Open Office is. I would love Google Docs to step up, but it definitely has not, and seems to be trapped in the Google perpetual beta limbo.
Your observation above is also a fantastic example of how public-sector projects can be freer than market-based solutions. In other words, it refutes hard libertarianism.
The fact that I can walk freely along the beach is another refutation of libertarianism.
Those on the right have books about feminism. Those on the left have feminist books.
Ownership is less clear-cut than you are making it, because virtual worlds introduce the idea of virtual labor. In some ways, it is as if you were being paid in factory scrip. Virtual worlds have introduced a new category of activity: play-labor, which acts a lot like regular labor, even though it occurs in the context of leisure. That's why there's markets for virtual-world currency.
China has generally decided that you have first dibs on the rights of the product of your labor, even if its virtual labor in a virtual world. There are limits to the rights you can give up even in a contractual setting: you can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't legally work for less than minimum wage. Blizzard wants the Chinese markets, so they, too, have to agree to the terms to "play" there.
Moving to a multi-process model is the other reason. It makes it a lot more attractive to use web-based application (e.g., Google Docs) if the process is isolated.
This is correct. There is a menu item to the right of the address bar on Chrome that lets you save a site as a stand-alone application. Site-specific browsers blur the line between application and site, and Chrome is really about Gears and SSBs.
It is definitely still beta (and I wish that Google would 1. get clearer on what a "beta" is and not use it to describe a range of circumstances from fresh-out-of-the-lab-and-will-probably-explode-if-you-move-it-too-quickly to people-have-been-using-this-for-4-years-and-we're-marketing-it-as-a-solution, and 2. stop abandoning some of its beta products without a clear roadmap.)
In my case, "anyone" includes the people who walk behind my desk when I start working, the little old lady who sits next to me when I commute to work, and most dangerously, my wife.
I consider it no more or less appropriate to introduce a teaching element to IT as I think it is to introduce it to academic medicine - which is to say, never as a cost-cutting measure or to let people learn by mistakes. If CS departments are interested in sponsoring internships in addition to a professionalized IT staff, that's fine and well. I definitely would not want to have research in biochemistry, philosophy, physics, linguistics et al compromised because a production server went down over the weekend, and the 3nd year CS undergrad in charge of it didn't know what to do (or was too busy studying for midterms to do it.) I've seen this sort of thing happen at campuses - and its driven off important research.
No library I know of is "run" by the English department. There are some entry-level work-study jobs which are staffed by English majors. Having a CS undergrad supervise a computer lab or do other intern-level tasks is fine.
Your pedagogy stops at my research lab's needs. (I'm assuming an R1 institution - a T1 university may not have research to jeopardize.)
I am fond of Google-based solutions, but I think it bears noting that both Gmail and Google Docs are still tagged as "beta" by Google. I don't know if it's because they have impossibly high standard for a release, or because the "beta" flag indemnifies them, but at the end of the day, you'd still be hitching your star on something that the vendor has technically described as not completely ready for prime-time.
Don't. The CS department is interested in education and research. They may come up with an innovative solution and write a few papers about it - then abandon it, leaving it with poor documentation, a bad interface, hundreds of bugs, and idiosyncratic and non-standard elements.
IT is not CS. IT is a service.CS is a discipline. Asking the CS department to run the academic IT systems is like asking the English department to run the library. It's a non-starter.
My wife tells me the same thing. Daily.
Before the age of two, it is best that they get exposed to almost no screen media whatsover: television, computer, videogames, etc. There is too much important cognitive development going on, particularly with regard to attention, spatial cognition, sensorimotor develop - that the screen can screw up. (No, the baby seeing something on a screen for 10 minutes won't be a disaster... but it shouldn't be part of the child's regular environment.)
The whole "Baby Einstein" con is pretty much a way that busy parents assuage their guilt for using the television as a babysitter by letting themselves be convinced that it's helping them developmentally. Before age 2, it isn't.
The real culprit is the breakdown of extended families and neighborhoods: two people is barely enough to raise a child well, and if one or, God forbid, both are working, there will be some consequences for either the child's development, the parents' well-being, or both. The real solution is grandparents, aunts/uncles, close friends, parenting circles/groups, etc.
Fortunately for you, your attitude and gracious manners are among the most effective contraceptives imaginable.
You also don't know how time-consuming your/i> kid is going to be until he/she arrives. Some are very low maintenance. Others aren't.
Ever since I have had a kid, I've learned how all the pontifications about parenting from people who don't actually have kids are generally as absurd, ignorant, and ridiculous as the thoughts of an Amish farmer about videogame consoles.
What I think is funny is when single and childless people on one hand admonish people for having children, and then turn around and wonder why their beliefs and values are becoming such a minoritarian stance. Ideologies that are hostile to childrearing are self-defeating.
The irony of the Wall Street bail-out is that it has made common cause between leftists and libertarians on economic policy.
It demonstrates something the Lenin once said, reflecting on the French revolution: that the bourgeois become utterly ruthless when their interests are threatened. The middle classes in America are willing to create an unholy alliance of Wall Street and Washington to protect their credit-fueled lifestyles, soaking future generations in order to give the wealthiest more money to lend them. This is much closer to Fascism, with a consumer-debt twist, than any of the maneuvers of the social conservatives of the past 30 years - and it has the support of about 60 percent of the populace.
Cue the Dem and Repubs pointing and accusing each other of doing just that.
You know, sometimes, one side really is right, or at least substantially less wrong than the other.
I know what you're getting at. OK, OK - I'll take the job. I was reluctant, but if I have to be the God-Emperor to keep things sorted, that's just a burden I'll have to bear.
I get a harem, don't I?
Not exactly. More like, I was willing to trade off the design benefits of the iPhone and its strong showing in applications for openness and flexibility. But if that openness and flexibility is only a fraction of what I'd hoped it be, it isn't worth the trade off.
After all, if push comes to shove and I'm violation ToS anyway, I can jailbreak the iPhone.
Unfortunately, Apple owns the patent on multi-touch. For the time being, there's no reason to believe that any non-Apple product will feature it.