Having recently travelled to Hungary, I have to agree with you. The US and the UK take the prize for the most intrusive police behavior, so far, in my experience of travelling and working in over 20 countries.
To say that nature is a construct against entropy is incorrect from a number of perspectives, including that of physics. It is, essentially, a kind of anthropormorphism.
Your last sentence essentially contradicts your penultimate sentence, as well. Think about it.
That is absolutely incorrect. Each of those examples involves specialized tasks, and can be only performed effectively by distributed both cognitive load and task load. If you see the collective task as a computational problem, it is clear that the task requires too much parallelism to be done by a single mind, and that considerable message passing occurs between individuals. Some people even act as buffers, filters, and parsers for information: assistants who determine which information needs to go upstream, people who record data and wait for an appropriate time (when the cognitive load and task-urgency of the information recipient permits it) to transmit the data, etc.
There are plenty of things separate from the individuals, as well: artifacts that store data, that structure processes, etc.
No, they are only important insofar as there are other things important to minds contingent on them. An argument can be made that it is mind-independent that minds are dependent on the survival of the planet, on space-time continuity, etc. Someone who considered something important that relied on these things, yet didn't consider these things important, could be accused of a failure of reasoning. But there still requires an active evaluation of importance by a mind somewhere in the loop.
I don't see how you've made any case that they are important outside a mind per se.
It depends whose life, and to whom, and what their criteria for determining importance are. Importance isn't a property of the world; it is a relationship between a mind and a thing. A child of mine would be more important than the entire US fleet - to me. Outside of peoples' minds, there is no such thing as "importance."
3. A sports team. 4. A development team. 5. A band of musicians. 6. A hunting party (intelligence distributed across species, often) 7. A film crew.
The most interesting human activities nowadays are those in which no single human being could possibly understand the masteries and fluences that constitute it. The anthropologist Emile Durkheim considered it a feature of the modern age: unlike our pre-modern ancestors, who often knew as individuals all the skills and methods by which they maintained their lives (even if they didn't do them all), we now rely on hundreds, thousands of people who do things that we don't really understand to do their jobs well, in order for us to live as we do.
See Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild," a study of navigation practices on a Naval vessel, for an answer to your question. I am willing to bet that very little of your own "intelligent" behavior is coherent or meaningful outside of a broader system, and that you rely on the cognitive capabilities of many others in order to operate yourself. What distinguishes "good input" from "stupid input" for human activities is usually something which is distributed across minds.
If the cost of the laptop represents over 50% of the per-student expenditure in a fairly wealthy country like Argentina, it represents far more than that in less developed countries. The real question then is, given the buying power within those countries, is that really the best expenditure of that money?
I'm also unconvinced by unsupported claims that giving people a laptop computer is going to propel those societies to prosperity - the hubris involved in that assumption would make almost any anthropologist laugh.
What really should be done is something more local, more scientific, and more humble: seeing the role that education does and/or could play in the lives of the people in that society, in that place, and determine what interventions provide the best return on investment. There could be technologies involved in this regard, as well, but they may be very different technologies: cameras and audio, or scientific measurement tools, or transportation technologies. To say that laptops can't hurt is to miss the opportunity cost - if you're trapped under an overturned car, with a broken leg, I could give you a cupcake and argue that I have, in fact, done something nice for you, but I think that would be misleading.
I think it is supposed to be targetted at populations that don't really have a geek culture as you understand it (my own intuition about geek culture - the gamer/comic/fan version of it, rather than the budding scientist part of it - is that it occurs in the developed world where you have a lower middle class with enough disposable income, but limited cultural capital.)
My skepticism about OLPC has just been captured by someone looking at the numbers (from the Jem report article cited above.) At first, I thought OLPC was simply misguided and well-meaning - I'm starting to view it as a kind of trojan horse.
There's a left-over assumption of a generation tech-divide that is becoming less and less meaningful. I'm probably from the first generation that really had that divide - home computing really came into its own as I was a child, and I picked up things pretty organically. Home computing at that time meant programming, too: over-the-counter software was limited, interfaces were command-line, etc.
I'm beginning to think of the 10-year window that followed my childhood as a "hump" - after seeing children (even some of the undergraduates at the Uni. where I am a researcher) treat computers as consumer products and "black boxes". The technology behind them has become too opaque - they are stuck on the other side of the interface. A computer is much closer to television now than it was 15 years ago.
So, the 30-to-40 set may actually be more technologically sophisticated than the sub-30 set.
I created a MySpace account because I like new and unusual music. In my experience, people in their 20's and 30's are more interested in unsigned bands and new music than teenagers are. In fact, the person who sent me a "request" to join MySpace was a composer of experimental "classical" music whose work I've followed for years!
MySpace has become virtually obligatory for musicians, and may be part of the path to breaking the major labels' control of the music production and distribution system.
I still can't stand MySpace, though. Hideous, hideous pages.
Your description isn't quite accurate. They don't "find it and build it," someone else builds it and promotes it, they youth - often unable to distinguish between "youth style" and real autonomy - gather into it, and then get carted off like so much freight to corporation who market aggressively to them.
The problem is that they (the youth - and pretty much everyone else) still have a consumer mentality. They confuse synchrony of taste and style with community. At least the ones in it for the meat market could be said to be a little less deluded.
A pet peeve: Marxism is not, ultimately, an economic model. It is a political model based on a socioeconomic analysis. The Marxist political program, insofar as it was blueprinted at all, is for political control by the working class, including control over the means of production. This is not the same thing as centralized command economies (although centralized command economies could well be the result of such a political change), and it is certainly not the same thing as a system of public benefits provided by a government which obtains its revenues by taxing individuals and organizations - the very revenue model for social-democratic welfare states relies on capitalism, on markets of labor and other institutions that are inconsistent with political control of society by the working class.
Marx was writing before the era of globalization, as well. The idea that the bulk of one country's working class could well be another country (e.g., China) was not something he addressed: he was perhaps under the impression that societies could be understood in national terms in some way.
I don't write this to defend Marx or Marxism (nor to critique them), but to correct an inappropriate reference to them.
A university is neither advertised as or designed to be a no-holds-barred ISP. You go to a university for an education on their terms, not for unlimited internet usage.
I kind of agree, though it depends on the games I happen to be playing (I don't play a lot of photo-realistic games: RTS doesn't really need the high end effects, but facial rendering and atmosphere is nice in the genres that use it.) But that's separate from the whole question of the videocard's depreciation: after all, that $95 video card will be worth $20 when that spendy card is worth $95.
I spend more than $340 on a 2-week holiday that's done in, um, 2 weeks. You have to think of it as a value-over-time thing: how much fun are you getting over those 18 months?
And most democracies are places were only the natives can vote. That may seem obvious and natural to you, but when observes how much of the lowest echelon of labor is immigrant labor - legal or otherwise - you see the problem. (Why is immigrant labor necessary? Because citizens will elect governments that provide enough public benefits that remove any incentive to do the worst jobs, making them attractive only to people without those benefits.)
The best policy is to secretly fund the developers you value most.
As it is, some contributors have more spare time than others, due to external circumstances. Some may be independently wealthy, and thus all their time is to "scratch" the itches they want, or to engage in whatever altruism tickles their fancy. Others may have families to feed. The illusion of a distributed project like Debian is that everyone is equal and all things fair. Disrupting that illusion unleashes resentment. Better to keep the illusion intact and support the developers you like without raising attention.
Of course this is not true, merit is very useful. If it weren't for the people who actually knew what they were doing, the world wouldn't be what it is today.
Actually, I think you've just disproven your point.
2. taking someone else's ideas as your own without giving credit.
3. pure plaigarism (an extreme example of 2, and then some.)
4. making claims about a work that you haven't studied directly (using secondary sources while trying to give the impression you are using the primary source.)
5. making false claims to buttress your argument (making stuff up... "Gertrude Stein had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that year, before finishing the novel." When one is very interdisciplinary, this can turn into the interdisciplinary bluff.
I'm not interested in the Zune and this DRM system, but the fact that the limitation is enforced by the file format and the software of the target player may really change the equation. The grandparent poster is correct.
The refusal to play the wireless-delivered file comes from its wrapper. That wrapper can be seen as an encrypted file system. I don't think that the CC license restricts anyone from encrypting anything. Is this really a DRM tool in the sense called for by the CC license, or is this just a limitation of the file system? After all, at no point in the system is there any authentication, any "check" on what the rights of the user are. There are no license checks, no phone-homes. It just plays three times and stops.
If I'm transmitting music from my iPod to an FM radio, it will only play one time and stop, without any replayability (unless I record using the "analog hole" from my radio - which I suspect the Zune will allow as well.) Obviously, the motivation behind this is to control the distribution of copyrighted material in some sense, but I don't think it rises to the level of DRM proper.
The closer analogy is actor+screenwriter=professor.
The University isn't paying the student to learn the material. The student (and whoever is funding him or her) is paying the University for the opportunity to learn it, and the opportunity to demonstrate and document that learning later on, in the form of a transcript, which will be a significant determinant factor of his or her future career, income, and status.
Slashdot Mirror
Having recently travelled to Hungary, I have to agree with you. The US and the UK take the prize for the most intrusive police behavior, so far, in my experience of travelling and working in over 20 countries.
To say that nature is a construct against entropy is incorrect from a number of perspectives, including that of physics. It is, essentially, a kind of anthropormorphism.
Your last sentence essentially contradicts your penultimate sentence, as well. Think about it.
That is absolutely incorrect. Each of those examples involves specialized tasks, and can be only performed effectively by distributed both cognitive load and task load. If you see the collective task as a computational problem, it is clear that the task requires too much parallelism to be done by a single mind, and that considerable message passing occurs between individuals. Some people even act as buffers, filters, and parsers for information: assistants who determine which information needs to go upstream, people who record data and wait for an appropriate time (when the cognitive load and task-urgency of the information recipient permits it) to transmit the data, etc.
There are plenty of things separate from the individuals, as well: artifacts that store data, that structure processes, etc.
No, they are only important insofar as there are other things important to minds contingent on them. An argument can be made that it is mind-independent that minds are dependent on the survival of the planet, on space-time continuity, etc. Someone who considered something important that relied on these things, yet didn't consider these things important, could be accused of a failure of reasoning. But there still requires an active evaluation of importance by a mind somewhere in the loop.
I don't see how you've made any case that they are important outside a mind per se.
It depends whose life, and to whom, and what their criteria for determining importance are. Importance isn't a property of the world; it is a relationship between a mind and a thing. A child of mine would be more important than the entire US fleet - to me. Outside of peoples' minds, there is no such thing as "importance."
3. A sports team.
4. A development team.
5. A band of musicians.
6. A hunting party (intelligence distributed across species, often)
7. A film crew.
The most interesting human activities nowadays are those in which no single human being could possibly understand the masteries and fluences that constitute it. The anthropologist Emile Durkheim considered it a feature of the modern age: unlike our pre-modern ancestors, who often knew as individuals all the skills and methods by which they maintained their lives (even if they didn't do them all), we now rely on hundreds, thousands of people who do things that we don't really understand to do their jobs well, in order for us to live as we do.
See Ed Hutchins' "Cognition in the Wild," a study of navigation practices on a Naval vessel, for an answer to your question. I am willing to bet that very little of your own "intelligent" behavior is coherent or meaningful outside of a broader system, and that you rely on the cognitive capabilities of many others in order to operate yourself. What distinguishes "good input" from "stupid input" for human activities is usually something which is distributed across minds.
If the cost of the laptop represents over 50% of the per-student expenditure in a fairly wealthy country like Argentina, it represents far more than that in less developed countries. The real question then is, given the buying power within those countries, is that really the best expenditure of that money?
I'm also unconvinced by unsupported claims that giving people a laptop computer is going to propel those societies to prosperity - the hubris involved in that assumption would make almost any anthropologist laugh.
What really should be done is something more local, more scientific, and more humble: seeing the role that education does and/or could play in the lives of the people in that society, in that place, and determine what interventions provide the best return on investment. There could be technologies involved in this regard, as well, but they may be very different technologies: cameras and audio, or scientific measurement tools, or transportation technologies. To say that laptops can't hurt is to miss the opportunity cost - if you're trapped under an overturned car, with a broken leg, I could give you a cupcake and argue that I have, in fact, done something nice for you, but I think that would be misleading.
I think it is supposed to be targetted at populations that don't really have a geek culture as you understand it (my own intuition about geek culture - the gamer/comic/fan version of it, rather than the budding scientist part of it - is that it occurs in the developed world where you have a lower middle class with enough disposable income, but limited cultural capital.)
My skepticism about OLPC has just been captured by someone looking at the numbers (from the Jem report article cited above.) At first, I thought OLPC was simply misguided and well-meaning - I'm starting to view it as a kind of trojan horse.
There's a left-over assumption of a generation tech-divide that is becoming less and less meaningful. I'm probably from the first generation that really had that divide - home computing really came into its own as I was a child, and I picked up things pretty organically. Home computing at that time meant programming, too: over-the-counter software was limited, interfaces were command-line, etc.
I'm beginning to think of the 10-year window that followed my childhood as a "hump" - after seeing children (even some of the undergraduates at the Uni. where I am a researcher) treat computers as consumer products and "black boxes". The technology behind them has become too opaque - they are stuck on the other side of the interface. A computer is much closer to television now than it was 15 years ago.
So, the 30-to-40 set may actually be more technologically sophisticated than the sub-30 set.
I created a MySpace account because I like new and unusual music. In my experience, people in their 20's and 30's are more interested in unsigned bands and new music than teenagers are. In fact, the person who sent me a "request" to join MySpace was a composer of experimental "classical" music whose work I've followed for years!
MySpace has become virtually obligatory for musicians, and may be part of the path to breaking the major labels' control of the music production and distribution system.
I still can't stand MySpace, though. Hideous, hideous pages.
Your description isn't quite accurate. They don't "find it and build it," someone else builds it and promotes it, they youth - often unable to distinguish between "youth style" and real autonomy - gather into it, and then get carted off like so much freight to corporation who market aggressively to them.
The problem is that they (the youth - and pretty much everyone else) still have a consumer mentality. They confuse synchrony of taste and style with community. At least the ones in it for the meat market could be said to be a little less deluded.
A pet peeve: Marxism is not, ultimately, an economic model. It is a political model based on a socioeconomic analysis. The Marxist political program, insofar as it was blueprinted at all, is for political control by the working class, including control over the means of production. This is not the same thing as centralized command economies (although centralized command economies could well be the result of such a political change), and it is certainly not the same thing as a system of public benefits provided by a government which obtains its revenues by taxing individuals and organizations - the very revenue model for social-democratic welfare states relies on capitalism, on markets of labor and other institutions that are inconsistent with political control of society by the working class.
Marx was writing before the era of globalization, as well. The idea that the bulk of one country's working class could well be another country (e.g., China) was not something he addressed: he was perhaps under the impression that societies could be understood in national terms in some way.
I don't write this to defend Marx or Marxism (nor to critique them), but to correct an inappropriate reference to them.
Days of major terrorist attacks in New York: 1, ever.
Number of major earthquakes on the West Coast: about 5 or 6 in the past century, spread out from California to Alaska.
Percentage of years in which Buffalo, New York has freeze-your-ass-off winters: 100.
A university is neither advertised as or designed to be a no-holds-barred ISP. You go to a university for an education on their terms, not for unlimited internet usage.
"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
It's a quote. From Matt Groening.
Firefox. Iceweasel. It's clever.
I kind of agree, though it depends on the games I happen to be playing (I don't play a lot of photo-realistic games: RTS doesn't really need the high end effects, but facial rendering and atmosphere is nice in the genres that use it.) But that's separate from the whole question of the videocard's depreciation: after all, that $95 video card will be worth $20 when that spendy card is worth $95.
I spend more than $340 on a 2-week holiday that's done in, um, 2 weeks. You have to think of it as a value-over-time thing: how much fun are you getting over those 18 months?
Everything's transient, really.
That's the thing about a doomsday scenario: you only have to be right once.
And most democracies are places were only the natives can vote. That may seem obvious and natural to you, but when observes how much of the lowest echelon of labor is immigrant labor - legal or otherwise - you see the problem. (Why is immigrant labor necessary? Because citizens will elect governments that provide enough public benefits that remove any incentive to do the worst jobs, making them attractive only to people without those benefits.)
The best policy is to secretly fund the developers you value most.
As it is, some contributors have more spare time than others, due to external circumstances. Some may be independently wealthy, and thus all their time is to "scratch" the itches they want, or to engage in whatever altruism tickles their fancy. Others may have families to feed. The illusion of a distributed project like Debian is that everyone is equal and all things fair. Disrupting that illusion unleashes resentment. Better to keep the illusion intact and support the developers you like without raising attention.
Of course this is not true, merit is very useful. If it weren't for the people who actually knew what they were doing, the world wouldn't be what it is today.
Actually, I think you've just disproven your point.
One cheats in the humanities by:
1. making up fake references.
2. taking someone else's ideas as your own without giving credit.
3. pure plaigarism (an extreme example of 2, and then some.)
4. making claims about a work that you haven't studied directly (using secondary sources while trying to give the impression you are using the primary source.)
5. making false claims to buttress your argument (making stuff up... "Gertrude Stein had been diagnosed with cancer earlier that year, before finishing the novel." When one is very interdisciplinary, this can turn into the interdisciplinary bluff.
I'm not interested in the Zune and this DRM system, but the fact that the limitation is enforced by the file format and the software of the target player may really change the equation. The grandparent poster is correct.
The refusal to play the wireless-delivered file comes from its wrapper. That wrapper can be seen as an encrypted file system. I don't think that the CC license restricts anyone from encrypting anything. Is this really a DRM tool in the sense called for by the CC license, or is this just a limitation of the file system? After all, at no point in the system is there any authentication, any "check" on what the rights of the user are. There are no license checks, no phone-homes. It just plays three times and stops.
If I'm transmitting music from my iPod to an FM radio, it will only play one time and stop, without any replayability (unless I record using the "analog hole" from my radio - which I suspect the Zune will allow as well.) Obviously, the motivation behind this is to control the distribution of copyrighted material in some sense, but I don't think it rises to the level of DRM proper.
The analogy you make is actor=student.
The closer analogy is actor+screenwriter=professor.
The University isn't paying the student to learn the material. The student (and whoever is funding him or her) is paying the University for the opportunity to learn it, and the opportunity to demonstrate and document that learning later on, in the form of a transcript, which will be a significant determinant factor of his or her future career, income, and status.