What surprises me is how few people really disagree with you here. I think there's a growing sense that OLPC is a boondoggle, and it is to their credit that more and more geeks are realizing it.
It occurs to me that one of the stories told about widespread internet use is that people would be able to do things like "look up how to fix their irrigation systems on the web". Well, I've been using the web since Mosaic 2.0, and I'm much less able to fix a truck, repair an irrigation system, care for a garden, or do a whole bunch of other things that I know a lot of other people who aren't using the net know how to do. If I want to learn how to fix a truck, I might use my laptop to find a school or a place to do it - but then I'm just replacing the yellow pages. I'm more likely to find someone in my own personal social network who has the skills I want to acquire, and hang out with them.
The one practical thing that net connectivity has given me is access to recipes for cooking that I didn't have before. If the OLPC enables children in the developing world to cook eggplant parmigiana, I guess that's a good thing, but it's probably a lot less ambitious than what the creators had in mind.
The early zeal of the project isn't even a matter of "having a hammer and seeing every problem as a nail," it's more like "having a cantaloupe and thinking it's a hammer, and then throwing your cantaloupe at vaguely nail-shaped kittens."
you'll be given the chance to push deeper and deeper into enemy territory until you finally reach THEIR capital, at which point you'll lay siege to it and - if successful - do things that... well, Slashdot is a FAMILY FRIENDLY place, so let's just say that you'll do terrible, terrible things to the huddled, whimpering survivors of the siege.
You don't think that the media might respond somewhat critically to the idea of an MMO that makes the opportunity for war-rape one of its attractive features, do you? Naww....
What he may really want is a secondary market for non-expiring rights. That would mean he could sell the rights in perpetuity to the royalties.
It's a horrid, selfish idea that would go wrong in ways I don't need to enumerate. Enjoy musicians for their music, artists for their art, and don't expect any real moral clarity from either of them.
It was an issue for me, and it has become an issue for friends and family who move around between computers with some frequency. The inflexible linkage between iPod and iTunes (outside of some 3rd party utilities which are problematic in themselves) was the deal-breaker for the iPod for me. That the iRiver has the best sound quality and additional functionality (FM, recorder) helps a lot. One friend of mine says that he felt a little cheated by the impression that there was "only" the iPod, and is planning to get an iRiver next.
A note about iTunes and Quicktime: Apple software plays much less "nicely" on Windows that MS software plays on Mac OS. Imagine if Word for Mac smuggled in the Windows XP UI - it'd be horrible.
So tech-industry centric. The software industry in-toto is about as evil as a a troop of girl scouts.
Microsoft on its most-evil day is a thousand times less evil than Monsanto on its better days. And Oracle ain't exactly all puppy farts and unicorn giggles, either.
Captcha is mostly about preventing bots from masquerading as humans in comments, right?
Well, if what is really happening is that they are paying a human to "pass" a human test and then post spam links, aren't we actually getting close to a situation where you are paying a human to promote your goods? Isn't this essentially the equivalent of a sandwich board?
That's the one. His book was a lot of fun - I read it because it had been left in a hotel room I was staying at during a business trip, and I loved it.
Funny, I find better food and service from places staffed by Spanish-speaking immigrants, by a long shot.
Go to a decent sampling of good restaurants and peak in the kitchens. The joke is that in the US, all food is Mexican food. Ask a chef for career advice, and one thing you will be told is to learn Spanish, because all your best staff will speak Spanish. Unlike a lot of others, Mexican kitchen staffs see cooking as their careers, and train themselves and each other intensively.
The best ramen house in the Bay Area I know has Mexican cooks working under a Japanese chef. All the good Italian restaurants in San Francisco have Hispanic staff. Same with continental. Go to Gary Denko's in SF, or the French Laundry in Napa, and most of the kitchen speaks Spanish.
I remember reading a biography of a chef in which he actually went back to Mexico with members of his kitchen staff to try to find out how they all learned to cook so well... and met their mothers.
The criticism I'm making is based on a fanboy being something other than having geek tastes. I have geek tastes, and I play WoW.
The poster was described as a fanboy because he defends the practices and products of Blizzard, just because they are Blizzard. (That was the accusation thrown against him to begin with.) It's fine to like any given Blizzard product as such, and my own tastes are rich with geeky goodness. But I think it's important to resist turning that into anything more than a marginally higher expectation of quality from the producer. Apple fans, Blizzard fans, Nintendo fans, Sony fans, etc. have transferred their dedication to the producer. They'll justify the legal maneuvers of those producers, because they liked the products.
Your entire post is a response to a critique of taste that I'm not making.
The other element is cost of living, as well: housing, in particular. The costs of mortgages in the housing boom in the US is in every produce made there. It's the inflation-that-dares-not-say-its-name.
I tried all those alternatives that worked on Windows (Anapod, etc.) They all sort of work, but were unstable, would lose music, etc, and only if you are cautious about which firmware you are putting in your iPod. But it was an incredible hassle, all in all. Apple is actively discouraging non-iTunes alternatives in a way that MS is not with PFS.
I might be wrong, but I'm neither new nor trolling. (And I'm not wrong.)
I know a couple doctors in their internships and residencies, and they would kill for a 10 hour work day. And they both drive crap cars. Granted, when that's all done, things get better - but not that much better.
My first impression was that the grandparent poster was promoting an incoherent libertarian line, but in fact he moved closer to my position when he wrote:
The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico.
There are a couple things wrong with this, though. Many Western nations are also heavily subsidized - the basis for saying that Mexico is a less free market than France is highly questionable. He's wrapping a generally viable protectionist stance in libertarian drag, but to do so he has to avoid scary words like equivalent labor markets.
I do think immigration has to relax quite a bit, too (partially for selfish reasons - I'm in an international relationship, and visa issues are daunting.) It is so obvious that labor boundaries are being used to preserve cheap labor in parts of the world. (Do you know how hard it is to get even a tourist's visa to the US from China? It's ridiculous - but I could easily start another rant on this topic. Suffice it to say that they experience of traveling to the US is a major contributor to anti-American sentiment.)
We know the limitations of being that overseas employee. First, you are almost certainly working for a contractor. That's an added middleman taking a slice of your income, right there. That middleman is also controlling the flow of information. The employee is not able to pursue other opportunities within the company.
In other words, the process has been outsourced: the employee per se has not been able to circulate in anything like equal terms within the labor market. The different is quite significant.
You're using a false opposition. Would you rather have someone who knew C++ and a bunch of libraries, or someone with a passing familiarity with it, but education in compilers, algorithms, and discrete math?
We aren't talking about MBA vs. CS degree: we're talking about theory vs. implementation.
That's short sighted. Not because pay doesn't matter - like I said, on a "micro"-scale within a career, it is an important consideration. It is because the forecast for those careers in the broadest sense is too tentative. CS could end up paying very well, like it did 8 short years ago. The bottom can fall out of IA in a couple of years. When these things happen, do you want to be doing something you are really suited for, or something that you only began for mercenary reasons to begin with?
Simple question: how free is the market if there isn't a relatively open immigration policy? Particularly when the production and distribution of goods and services are so freely moved across borders.
I'm inside academia right now, and my impression of what employers want is driven largely by what I hear industry representatives say. They want our undergrads to come out of the university ready to work with specific skills. They want graduate research to focus on applications, rather than basic research. There are various weasel words for these requests, but they are pretty apparent.
I don't blame them for wanting these things: its in their naked self-interest. But we shouldn't necessarily play along.
Slashdot Mirror
They're like the Imperial Stormtroopers of litigation.
What surprises me is how few people really disagree with you here. I think there's a growing sense that OLPC is a boondoggle, and it is to their credit that more and more geeks are realizing it.
It occurs to me that one of the stories told about widespread internet use is that people would be able to do things like "look up how to fix their irrigation systems on the web". Well, I've been using the web since Mosaic 2.0, and I'm much less able to fix a truck, repair an irrigation system, care for a garden, or do a whole bunch of other things that I know a lot of other people who aren't using the net know how to do. If I want to learn how to fix a truck, I might use my laptop to find a school or a place to do it - but then I'm just replacing the yellow pages. I'm more likely to find someone in my own personal social network who has the skills I want to acquire, and hang out with them.
The one practical thing that net connectivity has given me is access to recipes for cooking that I didn't have before. If the OLPC enables children in the developing world to cook eggplant parmigiana, I guess that's a good thing, but it's probably a lot less ambitious than what the creators had in mind.
The early zeal of the project isn't even a matter of "having a hammer and seeing every problem as a nail," it's more like "having a cantaloupe and thinking it's a hammer, and then throwing your cantaloupe at vaguely nail-shaped kittens."
While the "NPCs" in PvP have better tactical AI, their natural language processing and generation often leaves a lot to be desired.
I remember when the best conversation I had in an irc channel was with its bot...
you'll be given the chance to push deeper and deeper into enemy territory until you finally reach THEIR capital, at which point you'll lay siege to it and - if successful - do things that... well, Slashdot is a FAMILY FRIENDLY place, so let's just say that you'll do terrible, terrible things to the huddled, whimpering survivors of the siege.
You don't think that the media might respond somewhat critically to the idea of an MMO that makes the opportunity for war-rape one of its attractive features, do you? Naww....
Language often becomes vestigial. People still talk about "dialing" numbers - when was the last time most people have actually "dialed" anything?
What he may really want is a secondary market for non-expiring rights. That would mean he could sell the rights in perpetuity to the royalties.
It's a horrid, selfish idea that would go wrong in ways I don't need to enumerate. Enjoy musicians for their music, artists for their art, and don't expect any real moral clarity from either of them.
The only disappointment I have with my iRiver H10 20g model is that it does not, in fact, suppport .OGG, at least not on iRiver's firmware.
It was an issue for me, and it has become an issue for friends and family who move around between computers with some frequency. The inflexible linkage between iPod and iTunes (outside of some 3rd party utilities which are problematic in themselves) was the deal-breaker for the iPod for me. That the iRiver has the best sound quality and additional functionality (FM, recorder) helps a lot. One friend of mine says that he felt a little cheated by the impression that there was "only" the iPod, and is planning to get an iRiver next.
A note about iTunes and Quicktime: Apple software plays much less "nicely" on Windows that MS software plays on Mac OS. Imagine if Word for Mac smuggled in the Windows XP UI - it'd be horrible.
No, he's not! He was in his prime when he was 43, and he'll be in his prime again in 3 years.
So tech-industry centric. The software industry in-toto is about as evil as a a troop of girl scouts.
Microsoft on its most-evil day is a thousand times less evil than Monsanto on its better days. And Oracle ain't exactly all puppy farts and unicorn giggles, either.
Captcha is mostly about preventing bots from masquerading as humans in comments, right?
Well, if what is really happening is that they are paying a human to "pass" a human test and then post spam links, aren't we actually getting close to a situation where you are paying a human to promote your goods? Isn't this essentially the equivalent of a sandwich board?
That's the one. His book was a lot of fun - I read it because it had been left in a hotel room I was staying at during a business trip, and I loved it.
This is true throughout the country. In Chicago, New York, Seattle. The book I referred to was written by a New York-based chef.
And the Bay Area is not that close to the border.
Funny, I find better food and service from places staffed by Spanish-speaking immigrants, by a long shot.
Go to a decent sampling of good restaurants and peak in the kitchens. The joke is that in the US, all food is Mexican food. Ask a chef for career advice, and one thing you will be told is to learn Spanish, because all your best staff will speak Spanish. Unlike a lot of others, Mexican kitchen staffs see cooking as their careers, and train themselves and each other intensively.
The best ramen house in the Bay Area I know has Mexican cooks working under a Japanese chef. All the good Italian restaurants in San Francisco have Hispanic staff. Same with continental. Go to Gary Denko's in SF, or the French Laundry in Napa, and most of the kitchen speaks Spanish.
I remember reading a biography of a chef in which he actually went back to Mexico with members of his kitchen staff to try to find out how they all learned to cook so well... and met their mothers.
The criticism I'm making is based on a fanboy being something other than having geek tastes. I have geek tastes, and I play WoW.
The poster was described as a fanboy because he defends the practices and products of Blizzard, just because they are Blizzard. (That was the accusation thrown against him to begin with.) It's fine to like any given Blizzard product as such, and my own tastes are rich with geeky goodness. But I think it's important to resist turning that into anything more than a marginally higher expectation of quality from the producer. Apple fans, Blizzard fans, Nintendo fans, Sony fans, etc. have transferred their dedication to the producer. They'll justify the legal maneuvers of those producers, because they liked the products.
Your entire post is a response to a critique of taste that I'm not making.
The other element is cost of living, as well: housing, in particular. The costs of mortgages in the housing boom in the US is in every produce made there. It's the inflation-that-dares-not-say-its-name.
I tried all those alternatives that worked on Windows (Anapod, etc.) They all sort of work, but were unstable, would lose music, etc, and only if you are cautious about which firmware you are putting in your iPod. But it was an incredible hassle, all in all. Apple is actively discouraging non-iTunes alternatives in a way that MS is not with PFS.
I might be wrong, but I'm neither new nor trolling. (And I'm not wrong.)
I know a couple doctors in their internships and residencies, and they would kill for a 10 hour work day. And they both drive crap cars. Granted, when that's all done, things get better - but not that much better.
My first impression was that the grandparent poster was promoting an incoherent libertarian line, but in fact he moved closer to my position when he wrote:
The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico.
There are a couple things wrong with this, though. Many Western nations are also heavily subsidized - the basis for saying that Mexico is a less free market than France is highly questionable. He's wrapping a generally viable protectionist stance in libertarian drag, but to do so he has to avoid scary words like equivalent labor markets.
I do think immigration has to relax quite a bit, too (partially for selfish reasons - I'm in an international relationship, and visa issues are daunting.) It is so obvious that labor boundaries are being used to preserve cheap labor in parts of the world. (Do you know how hard it is to get even a tourist's visa to the US from China? It's ridiculous - but I could easily start another rant on this topic. Suffice it to say that they experience of traveling to the US is a major contributor to anti-American sentiment.)
We know the limitations of being that overseas employee. First, you are almost certainly working for a contractor. That's an added middleman taking a slice of your income, right there. That middleman is also controlling the flow of information. The employee is not able to pursue other opportunities within the company.
In other words, the process has been outsourced: the employee per se has not been able to circulate in anything like equal terms within the labor market. The different is quite significant.
You're using a false opposition. Would you rather have someone who knew C++ and a bunch of libraries, or someone with a passing familiarity with it, but education in compilers, algorithms, and discrete math?
We aren't talking about MBA vs. CS degree: we're talking about theory vs. implementation.
That's short sighted. Not because pay doesn't matter - like I said, on a "micro"-scale within a career, it is an important consideration. It is because the forecast for those careers in the broadest sense is too tentative. CS could end up paying very well, like it did 8 short years ago. The bottom can fall out of IA in a couple of years. When these things happen, do you want to be doing something you are really suited for, or something that you only began for mercenary reasons to begin with?
Labor isn't moved freely over borders at all. Only the products of that labor. I challenge you to find a job in a country that you never visit.
Simple question: how free is the market if there isn't a relatively open immigration policy? Particularly when the production and distribution of goods and services are so freely moved across borders.
I'm inside academia right now, and my impression of what employers want is driven largely by what I hear industry representatives say. They want our undergrads to come out of the university ready to work with specific skills. They want graduate research to focus on applications, rather than basic research. There are various weasel words for these requests, but they are pretty apparent.
I don't blame them for wanting these things: its in their naked self-interest. But we shouldn't necessarily play along.