The court system is very good about convicting criminals. The statistic I recall is that above 90% of all criminal cases result in a conviction. In fact, the conviction of the innocent (even in capital cases) is a mounting problem: we have too many hanging juries.
The problem is one of enforcement: you can't prosecute a crime without a criminal, and you can't dissuade crime without a presence on the streets.
Actually, though, the real crime rate (you know, the crime rate that is in the real world, not on TV) is the lowest it has been for almost 40 years. In general, for violent crimes other than homicide, the US is lower than most of the rest of the world. The homicide rate is disturbingly high.
My pulling-the-plug suggestion is really specific to the situation described here: something that completely, dramatically eclipses the child's other interests and interferes with his learning in a way that isn't characteristic of other stimuli. It wasn't meant as catch-all advice. Im terms of "positive reinforcement," my point is that when an activity has become an addiciton, essentially, it really can't be used well for reinforcement in a healthy way.
If the kid has a dozen activities and stimuli he doesn't respond addictively to, but then starts dropping friends and other interests for one stimuli, you can start to say that for him, games are addictive. If it were all with the people, then any pleasurable input should be equally addictive. But that's not the case.
Some people can take or leave opiates, or cocaine, or alcohol. That doesn't mean those substances aren't addictive for most people.
I disagree. This attitude is appropriate for adults, or even teens. It's not appropriate for pre-teens, who have a fairly brief window of cognitive plasticity to absorb some very important skills.
The parents need to pull the plug. When he's 14 or so, the nature of the situation can change.
The pull of addictive stimuli is powerful, too. Would you "negotiate" the amount of tobacco a 9 year old kid was allowed to smoke?
The Inquisition is not the same as the witch-hunts. The targets of the Inquisition were more often literate urbanites, not pre-literate folk religionists.
There is a good book about how the weakness of certain government institutions makes the level of private investment required to fuel a business environment (particularly for manufacturing or trade) difficult. It's called The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando de Soto. Essentially, when the cadastral apparatus that lets people leverage the value of their own lands is too weak, its difficult to mobilize mass investment. Foreign investment doesn't really build up enough local wealth to do long-term development. This isn't a universal problem, but in places like Peru (the area I know best) it's a real part of the problem; it's why good land reform is essentially, and bad land reform is disastrous.
The entire term "developing" world is problematic. It assumes a teleology: that societies like the US and Europe are at some ideal state that others need to aspire to, that levels of consumption and production are the indices of progress.
I'm not an anti-technologist who idealizes pre-modern ways of life, and I think it's a good thing if kids all around the world can get vaccines and medical care. But not every not-first-world society is just a mess of problems, and the problems aren't all the same everywhere. Most places actually have enough to eat most of the time; some areas are occassionally subject to famine due to reasons environmental, political, and economic. Many have sustainable economies where people aren't starving at all and things are generally OK--the biggest difference between their way of life and those in the "first world" is that they watch TV together in a public space, instead of having one at home, and that they take jitneys instead of driving; others are struggling with disease and sanitation issues, or war, or oppressive governments, or widespread crime. Maybe having internet connections in some of these areas will be helpful, maybe they won't. These things are entirely local issues: no single attitude or policy about "the developing world" is useful.
So maybe the first thing to do is to actually listen and learn from the people who you want to help, and not assume that you can characterize over half the world was one model.
OS X will not come to Intel as a viable product. If OS X ends up eroding Window's lead, it will be on Apple hardware. That is, in a sense, its strength as well as its weakness: it extends the uniformity of the platform onto hardware.
OS/2 failed because people do not buy operating systems, at least not on the scale that would be required to reach "tipping point."
It really amazes me how misguided some people are about anything but the one aspect of the field they may know something about. As if "advertising" was this magic wand separating success from failure.
About 14 years ago, another operating system enjoyed some of the most impressive advertising efforts imaginable: OS/2. Billboards and posters were everywhere, there were televisions commericals advertising it. IBM sponsored the Aloha Bowl and festooned it with OS/2 material. And, on top of all this, it was a good operating system.
It still failed.
Computer users invest a great deal of cognitive capacity in buiding a model of the way to do the work they want to do, and an interface that meets that model will not be abandoned lightly. There are dozens of other bits of familiarity that are vital to a user, from knowing where the word processing software is, to being able to download small apps by oneself. There's a vast real investment in learning the mainstream productivity applications (Office, etc.) that pervades the labor pool.
There are other elements of useability that your solution misses: straightforward introduction of new hardware, for example. The original article was correct: Linux is not a platform, it is a kernel. I, too, have systems that are still running on 2.2 kernels. But I haven't tried to attach any new hardware to them, either, and they are pretty old machines. That's not desktop material. (And, of vital importance to commercial users, the hardware is far out of warranty.)
GNOME and KDE are noble efforts to begin with a solid user experience and work back to being a full-fledged platform, but the fact that there are already 2 of them is a bad sign. There are already competing attempts to brand and market linux -- and they tend to compete with each other, confusing the market even more.
I'm not an Apple fan by any means, but I think he's correct: OS X is the strongest contender to really unseat Windows.
If you are typing those words into a blog, no. If you come up to a gay Candian Methodist on the street, stare him in the eyes, and say that to him, particularly if you are in a position by which you could conceivably cause him harm, yes.
Distinguish between words and utterances. The latter are context-sensitive actions, "performative speech." Some utterances are threats.
Of course I won't. I'll wait for a couple more reviews.
Look, if people are willing to pay for bad movies (when there are very many good movies produced independently), why should they bother making good ones?
Maybe geeks should consider spending their 8 bucks on a film that isn't science fiction, if the science fiction films that come out stink. There's Nobody Knows, an excellent film from Japanese director Kore-eda, that is making the rounds. No aliens, no hackers, no special effects, no cheap closure. Maybe if films like that got some geek-cash, then they'd start creating sci-fi films of a similar caliber again (like Gattaca.)
Getting a PhD doesn't mean you can do these things, but a lot of the things you need to do to get a PhD are things you would need to do to accomplish those other things. And, an inability to get a PhD probably indicates you don't have what it takes to do the rest. Also, the process of earning a PhD gives you access to resources, equipment, money, and the existing literature on a subject, which can save you from re-inventing some wheels.
In theory, someone may know how to drive without a driver's license, and many with licenses are horrible drivers. But I wouldn't want to get in the car with someone who doesn't have a license.
It's not a matter of "feeling" superior. There are people above and below all of us in any situation. The PhD. is just a marker, in my example - it refers specifically to people doing actual research and using that degree and the level of education, understanding, etc. that it indicates (a fast-food guy with a PhD is simply an overeducated fast-food guy, unless he's, for example, working on a novel.) We are largely talking about class as a kind of function, not as a vague meter of personal worth.
The executive management doesn't "feel" superior, or need to. They are just working at a different level than you are. Their time is more important, on a number of fairly objective scales. Do you feel "superior" to the janitor where you work? Do you think your time is worth the same as his? Are you willing to earn the same amount of money? Do you want an interviewing process as rigorous and demanding as that of the CEO?
There's a kind of plateau people see: they see the gap between themselves and people above them as mostly accidental, or fictional. They see the gap between themselves and people below them as natural, or as a consequence of moral, ethical, or other personal attainments.
A fast food employee may be as valuable to you as a person, but we very rarely deal with people as people. Most of our dealings with others are in the context of the goods and services they provide. Instead of "CEO," think "neurologist." I suspect you'll have far higher expectations of your neurologist, and frankly think higher of his abilities.
You can get great respect for performing your job brilliantly, or you may be ignored. Yet it will not really change your position substantially.
Suppose someone at a fast food restaurant does a bang-up job of serving your food - gets the order right, the food is prepared perfectly. You respect him. But do you think he's now in the same tier as you? Maybe you'll give him a few extra bucks, but you probably won't invite him to your parties and you'd feel pretty weird if your graduate-school educated sister went out with him.
Well, that goes in both directions. Your B-school educated manager, or PhD-awarded engineer or researcher, is going to give you respect for a job well done. But if you think that translates into access to a new tier of status and esteem, think again. A lot of IT geeks think that their mastery over one piece of infrastructure should translate into general esteem for their intellectual prowess, but that's as much driven by resentment and an inability to understand what's really going on around them as anything.
In the meantime, though, refer to the Arizona-Mexico Commissions 2001 report, "Labor Shrotages and Illegal Immigration: Arizona's Three-pronged strategy." There's a special fund within the social security system for fund withheld without valid SSNs. As of the report, that fund held over $265 billion, and was growing at a rate of about $17 billion a year. Those are funds that the illegal immigrants put in and can not get back.
Mexico is a less class-mobile society than the US. These kids aren't just Mexican - they're poor. If they had been born in the middle- to upper-middle classes in Mexico, they could go to a decent shool, and then on to Monterrey or UNAM, and get great jobs. But they aren't in the middle class - they'd have little chance of getting those opportunities in Mexico. Their parents came to the US because they couldn't support their families at all back home.
They probably do pay federal income tax, using a fake SSN, and have the taxes witheld from their paychecks. Which means that not only do they pay the tax, they don't always get to file a return.
"for all intensive purposes" supplanting "for all intents and purposes." It's not just that it's a mistake, it's a mistake based on a pretentious attempt to sound sophisticated.
What is truly horrifying about this is that the threads have gone on this long without anyone pointing this out. I really have to bookmark this discussion - whenever I describe the collapse of critical thought among soi-disant "smart" people, particularly in America, I'll paste this link back to them.
This entire thread greatly reduces the history of the Bible to "a bunch of guys". It is a complex bundle of documents with a very institutional history, and the reason for the survival of the Bible has more to do with the history of the institution that consolidated various Codices in several councils , including the Coucil of Rome (382 CE), of Carthage (397CE), and others. The Old Testament used by Chistians was first drawn up around 170 CE, and it too went through various changes. The Bible that most of us are familiar with comes from the Council of Trent's recognition of the Vulgate editon of St. Jerome (c. 410 CE).
So, the Bible doesn't perpetuate itself. It was consolidate, constructed, and perpetuated by an institution backed with the power of the Roman Empire, and then later the armies of Christiandom.
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The court system is very good about convicting criminals. The statistic I recall is that above 90% of all criminal cases result in a conviction. In fact, the conviction of the innocent (even in capital cases) is a mounting problem: we have too many hanging juries.
The problem is one of enforcement: you can't prosecute a crime without a criminal, and you can't dissuade crime without a presence on the streets.
Actually, though, the real crime rate (you know, the crime rate that is in the real world, not on TV) is the lowest it has been for almost 40 years. In general, for violent crimes other than homicide, the US is lower than most of the rest of the world. The homicide rate is disturbingly high.
My pulling-the-plug suggestion is really specific to the situation described here: something that completely, dramatically eclipses the child's other interests and interferes with his learning in a way that isn't characteristic of other stimuli. It wasn't meant as catch-all advice. Im terms of "positive reinforcement," my point is that when an activity has become an addiciton, essentially, it really can't be used well for reinforcement in a healthy way.
If the kid has a dozen activities and stimuli he doesn't respond addictively to, but then starts dropping friends and other interests for one stimuli, you can start to say that for him, games are addictive. If it were all with the people, then any pleasurable input should be equally addictive. But that's not the case.
Some people can take or leave opiates, or cocaine, or alcohol. That doesn't mean those substances aren't addictive for most people.
I disagree. This attitude is appropriate for adults, or even teens. It's not appropriate for pre-teens, who have a fairly brief window of cognitive plasticity to absorb some very important skills.
The parents need to pull the plug. When he's 14 or so, the nature of the situation can change.
The pull of addictive stimuli is powerful, too. Would you "negotiate" the amount of tobacco a 9 year old kid was allowed to smoke?
The preceding message was paid for by the American Parentheses Manufacturers Association.
Actually, dog collars and leashes were popular office attire in the mid-90's.
The creative departments in many Bay Area companies were staffed with what was called "dog collar labor".
This sounds like a prank, an Adbusters/Yes Men type project to show how ridiculous the bottom-line-uber-alles mentality can be.
The Inquisition is not the same as the witch-hunts. The targets of the Inquisition were more often literate urbanites, not pre-literate folk religionists.
There is a good book about how the weakness of certain government institutions makes the level of private investment required to fuel a business environment (particularly for manufacturing or trade) difficult. It's called The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando de Soto. Essentially, when the cadastral apparatus that lets people leverage the value of their own lands is too weak, its difficult to mobilize mass investment. Foreign investment doesn't really build up enough local wealth to do long-term development. This isn't a universal problem, but in places like Peru (the area I know best) it's a real part of the problem; it's why good land reform is essentially, and bad land reform is disastrous.
The entire term "developing" world is problematic. It assumes a teleology: that societies like the US and Europe are at some ideal state that others need to aspire to, that levels of consumption and production are the indices of progress.
I'm not an anti-technologist who idealizes pre-modern ways of life, and I think it's a good thing if kids all around the world can get vaccines and medical care. But not every not-first-world society is just a mess of problems, and the problems aren't all the same everywhere. Most places actually have enough to eat most of the time; some areas are occassionally subject to famine due to reasons environmental, political, and economic. Many have sustainable economies where people aren't starving at all and things are generally OK--the biggest difference between their way of life and those in the "first world" is that they watch TV together in a public space, instead of having one at home, and that they take jitneys instead of driving; others are struggling with disease and sanitation issues, or war, or oppressive governments, or widespread crime. Maybe having internet connections in some of these areas will be helpful, maybe they won't. These things are entirely local issues: no single attitude or policy about "the developing world" is useful.
So maybe the first thing to do is to actually listen and learn from the people who you want to help, and not assume that you can characterize over half the world was one model.
OS X will not come to Intel as a viable product. If OS X ends up eroding Window's lead, it will be on Apple hardware. That is, in a sense, its strength as well as its weakness: it extends the uniformity of the platform onto hardware.
OS/2 failed because people do not buy operating systems, at least not on the scale that would be required to reach "tipping point."
It really amazes me how misguided some people are about anything but the one aspect of the field they may know something about. As if "advertising" was this magic wand separating success from failure.
About 14 years ago, another operating system enjoyed some of the most impressive advertising efforts imaginable: OS/2. Billboards and posters were everywhere, there were televisions commericals advertising it. IBM sponsored the Aloha Bowl and festooned it with OS/2 material. And, on top of all this, it was a good operating system.
It still failed.
Computer users invest a great deal of cognitive capacity in buiding a model of the way to do the work they want to do, and an interface that meets that model will not be abandoned lightly. There are dozens of other bits of familiarity that are vital to a user, from knowing where the word processing software is, to being able to download small apps by oneself. There's a vast real investment in learning the mainstream productivity applications (Office, etc.) that pervades the labor pool.
There are other elements of useability that your solution misses: straightforward introduction of new hardware, for example. The original article was correct: Linux is not a platform, it is a kernel. I, too, have systems that are still running on 2.2 kernels. But I haven't tried to attach any new hardware to them, either, and they are pretty old machines. That's not desktop material. (And, of vital importance to commercial users, the hardware is far out of warranty.)
GNOME and KDE are noble efforts to begin with a solid user experience and work back to being a full-fledged platform, but the fact that there are already 2 of them is a bad sign. There are already competing attempts to brand and market linux -- and they tend to compete with each other, confusing the market even more.
I'm not an Apple fan by any means, but I think he's correct: OS X is the strongest contender to really unseat Windows.
If you are typing those words into a blog, no. If you come up to a gay Candian Methodist on the street, stare him in the eyes, and say that to him, particularly if you are in a position by which you could conceivably cause him harm, yes.
Distinguish between words and utterances. The latter are context-sensitive actions, "performative speech." Some utterances are threats.
I just tried your suggestion, and now my laptop won't boot up. Please advise.
Of course I won't. I'll wait for a couple more reviews.
Look, if people are willing to pay for bad movies (when there are very many good movies produced independently), why should they bother making good ones?
Maybe geeks should consider spending their 8 bucks on a film that isn't science fiction, if the science fiction films that come out stink. There's Nobody Knows, an excellent film from Japanese director Kore-eda, that is making the rounds. No aliens, no hackers, no special effects, no cheap closure. Maybe if films like that got some geek-cash, then they'd start creating sci-fi films of a similar caliber again (like Gattaca.)
The question then is, what is speech? After all, slander, threats, libel, bribary, and verbal contracts are all "speech," yet they aren't free.
Getting a PhD doesn't mean you can do these things, but a lot of the things you need to do to get a PhD are things you would need to do to accomplish those other things. And, an inability to get a PhD probably indicates you don't have what it takes to do the rest. Also, the process of earning a PhD gives you access to resources, equipment, money, and the existing literature on a subject, which can save you from re-inventing some wheels.
In theory, someone may know how to drive without a driver's license, and many with licenses are horrible drivers. But I wouldn't want to get in the car with someone who doesn't have a license.
It's not a matter of "feeling" superior. There are people above and below all of us in any situation. The PhD. is just a marker, in my example - it refers specifically to people doing actual research and using that degree and the level of education, understanding, etc. that it indicates (a fast-food guy with a PhD is simply an overeducated fast-food guy, unless he's, for example, working on a novel.) We are largely talking about class as a kind of function, not as a vague meter of personal worth.
The executive management doesn't "feel" superior, or need to. They are just working at a different level than you are. Their time is more important, on a number of fairly objective scales. Do you feel "superior" to the janitor where you work? Do you think your time is worth the same as his? Are you willing to earn the same amount of money? Do you want an interviewing process as rigorous and demanding as that of the CEO?
There's a kind of plateau people see: they see the gap between themselves and people above them as mostly accidental, or fictional. They see the gap between themselves and people below them as natural, or as a consequence of moral, ethical, or other personal attainments.
A fast food employee may be as valuable to you as a person, but we very rarely deal with people as people. Most of our dealings with others are in the context of the goods and services they provide. Instead of "CEO," think "neurologist." I suspect you'll have far higher expectations of your neurologist, and frankly think higher of his abilities.
You can get great respect for performing your job brilliantly, or you may be ignored. Yet it will not really change your position substantially.
Suppose someone at a fast food restaurant does a bang-up job of serving your food - gets the order right, the food is prepared perfectly. You respect him. But do you think he's now in the same tier as you? Maybe you'll give him a few extra bucks, but you probably won't invite him to your parties and you'd feel pretty weird if your graduate-school educated sister went out with him.
Well, that goes in both directions. Your B-school educated manager, or PhD-awarded engineer or researcher, is going to give you respect for a job well done. But if you think that translates into access to a new tier of status and esteem, think again. A lot of IT geeks think that their mastery over one piece of infrastructure should translate into general esteem for their intellectual prowess, but that's as much driven by resentment and an inability to understand what's really going on around them as anything.
Doubt all you like.
In the meantime, though, refer to the Arizona-Mexico Commissions 2001 report, "Labor Shrotages and Illegal Immigration: Arizona's Three-pronged strategy." There's a special fund within the social security system for fund withheld without valid SSNs. As of the report, that fund held over $265 billion, and was growing at a rate of about $17 billion a year. Those are funds that the illegal immigrants put in and can not get back.
The report can be found here.
Perhaps not in the long run.
Mexico is a less class-mobile society than the US. These kids aren't just Mexican - they're poor. If they had been born in the middle- to upper-middle classes in Mexico, they could go to a decent shool, and then on to Monterrey or UNAM, and get great jobs. But they aren't in the middle class - they'd have little chance of getting those opportunities in Mexico. Their parents came to the US because they couldn't support their families at all back home.
They probably do pay federal income tax, using a fake SSN, and have the taxes witheld from their paychecks. Which means that not only do they pay the tax, they don't always get to file a return.
The one that cheeses me off the most:
"for all intensive purposes" supplanting "for all intents and purposes." It's not just that it's a mistake, it's a mistake based on a pretentious attempt to sound sophisticated.
What is truly horrifying about this is that the threads have gone on this long without anyone pointing this out. I really have to bookmark this discussion - whenever I describe the collapse of critical thought among soi-disant "smart" people, particularly in America, I'll paste this link back to them.
This entire thread greatly reduces the history of the Bible to "a bunch of guys". It is a complex bundle of documents with a very institutional history, and the reason for the survival of the Bible has more to do with the history of the institution that consolidated various Codices in several councils , including the Coucil of Rome (382 CE), of Carthage (397CE), and others. The Old Testament used by Chistians was first drawn up around 170 CE, and it too went through various changes. The Bible that most of us are familiar with comes from the Council of Trent's recognition of the Vulgate editon of St. Jerome (c. 410 CE).
So, the Bible doesn't perpetuate itself. It was consolidate, constructed, and perpetuated by an institution backed with the power of the Roman Empire, and then later the armies of Christiandom.