The arguement that all religions are cult to some degree is fairly weak, IMO. I've learned quite a bit about Jehova's witnesses since my gf used to be one of them. I myself was raised Lutheran.
In Jehova's Witness (JW) world, they control you on several fronts. You can't have friends outside the religion. You are STRONGLY discouraged from pursuing post secondary education, arguably to make you dependant on the JW network of members if times get rough, which can happen when all you have is a low paying part time job. They take up most of your time, there are four "services" per week.
Most importantly, you can be kicked out for a number of reasons: pre-marital sex (the big one for them), smoking (I think), even voting I beleive. If you get kicked out, coupled with rule #1 from above, you have NOTHING left. When my gf left the religion (before she met me) because she didn't beleive it, she was suicidal for quite a while. She had no friends, and her parents didn't talk to her for a year. Normally if you formally leave, no one, not even your parents, can talk to you EVER AGAIN. I don't know how she made it.
My religious experience was far different. Church once a week. I had more friends outside of church than inside, who were in other religions or none at all. There was no such thing as being kicked out of the church. You could be "forgiven" for anything. Sure, part of religion is "indoctrination", but it's nothing like the mind control you see in cults.
There are books out there that have rules to determine whether a religion is cult or not. Most involve mind control, money control (which JW's don't really have), and culture control of your person. Usually if a religion meets a certain number of the rules it is considered cult.
Scientology fits most of the rules I know of. Most religions were created with good intentions, even though many have been perverted into forms of control, but scientology was always evil. It was always a for-profit venture.
CE gives you more options. At the school I went to, CE is a cross between EE and CS, so you'll take some of the junior level EE courses and cut a few CS courses. At a lot of schools, I think they have special CE courses, but the coursework is probably pretty similar to what I had in my upper level EE courses.
Now for the important part. Here is what you can do (without a lot of trouble, anyway) with each of the degrees:
Please no flames by CS people who do jobs I didn't list, this is from what I've seen at my school.
Notice which ones allow you to do more. And yes, software companies will go for EE's and CE's. I had a few recruit me, in fact, although I wanted to go into hardware.
The saying is this: EE's can be taught software. CS's cannot be taught hardware. I'd go for CE in your case. EE and CE degrees are far more "robust" than CS degrees in my opinion. Keep this in mind, however: you won't have to choose a major or lose much time if you don't decide for sure until about the end of your second year. The coursework proabbly won't vary by more than a few classes in that timeframe.
There are a few things that can be changed. They are not in the spirit of capitalism, but capitalism isn't in the spirit of democracy anyway.
1. Media outlets cannot be owned by megacorporations. Any company shouldn't be allowed more than a small number of newspapers / tv stations / radio stations. AOL time warner owns far too many outlets which gives them huge control over pop culture.
2. Media outlets cannot be controlled by corporations that are in ANY other business. This leads to conflicts of interest.
3. A more extreme measure, media outlets cannot be for profit entities. The pressure on them to make the big corporations that advertise on their stations is far too great. Kalle Lasn, who runs adbusters magazine, is normally turned down by TV stations to run his TV ads. His ads are usually about not spending your money on crap you don't need, or reducing consumption. The reason he gets rejected? It would anger other advertisers who sells products to the public and drive them away.
"Control" of actual stories by some agency is too bit extreme to me. The things listed above would go a long way to reducing serious pressures on what goes on the air.
Just because a vast majority of the free & democratic news outlets parrot what the RIAA says doesn't make those news outlets any less free.
That's true, on some theoretical level. The problem is that many people equate free with unbiased. Of course, bias is a part of any opinion or story, but people generally view the media as being an accurate representation of what is going on in the world. Clearly, it is not, and that is unacceptable. Don't tell me to quit bitching when these pathetic media outlets blatently lie every day. Some level of integrity is needed. And yes, I also know we all have a responsibilty to get out there and help end the problem.
heh. Actually, I do know the solution, and yeah you're correct. Stuff like this just depresses me.
1) I don't buy all that many cd's nowdays, and of those I do, most are from small labels anyway. I fully embrace mp3's, and wish all artists had some sort of street performers protocol setup so I could donate money that goes to them and not some marketing machine...
2) I try to do this to some extent, often people think I'm strange since they're so brainwashed by consumer culture, however. It's easier with cd's, since the price is so rediculous and has actually gone up over the past 5 years or so.
3) Well, you can only do so much, and admittedly I haven't done any voluteer work, although I want to. I wouldn't mind doing some culture jamming.
I don't know about you, but frankly I'm sick of our "free and democratic" mass media passing along whatever Big Corporation Guy says like a puppet.
And people wonder where most of our society's problems come from. Read stories like this, with lies I can hardly believe, and the answer seems a bit clearer. How did greed ever reach such levels? I feel damn near helpless to stop crap like this.
Normally when the government seemingly sides with consumers it suprises me. However, there are industries out there who are severely slowed by "big brother" types of content control.
This would be the hardware industry, storage industry, and really any "tech" industry. If we can't move forward with technologies that generally allow the free flow of information, these industries will slow greatly, with no new products or products consumers don't want. Remember, these industries have lobbyists too, who can whisper their agenda into Mr. Hatch's ear.
It's not even a right, a right is quite similar to a guarantee. You're only given a CHANCE to profit. How is the right to vote not the same as a guarantee to vote? I don't understand the difference.
You know, he should be right...windows should be better than linux. All that money and power, and look what they put out. Semi-functional bloatware. I don't need to tell everyone here about all the inovation paradoxes in his statement. Too easy of a target:)
Frankly any product that is free, or at least costs less than what you needed before, gives more power to the individual. That, my friends, is the American spirit. THAT is democracy. The right to profit is NOT. Unfortunatly, most of America has forgotten this.
I work in the hard drive industry (scary) and there are a few monetary benefits to the company, hopefully passed on to the consumer...
Basically platter yield goes up. HD companies lose a certain % of platters when the two sides aren't parallel to each other within spec. With a one sided setup this doesn't matter and won't cut into yield. Also, since Si defects will always be there, you can gain some yield back when the defects are only on one side, and simply use the other side.
Where does the pressure come from? The "best interests" of society are typically different than what corporations want or need to stay profitable. Does it come from lobbyist groups, politicians who have large financial backing, or somewhere else? Since the stance of the EFF in my opinion is far different than what the FCC usually does (the "donation" of the HDTV frequency spectrum comes to mind), how do you deal with this? And do you have the power to push through policies that the EFF would favor?
The motley fool had a decent article a few days ago on how the situation is a combination of poorly executed deregulation, NIMBYism (or BANANAism as they call it...Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), and limits on what fuels can be used. It can be found here.
But the feature has come under fire from writers and publishers groups, which say it is an "aggressive" tactic that threatens to eat into sales of new books and take royalty money out of the pockets of their members.
HA! I can end this debate in just a few paragraphs. You know who else stated these exact words about 10 years ago? The music industry. Remember that? They wanted to make it illegal to sell used CD's, for the EXACT same reasons. They pulled out people like Garth Brooks to speak out against such terrible evils.
Lets see. Last I checked:
- Used CD stores all over the landscape
- MP3's "ruining" the world
- Record industry still recording record profits last year.
Boy, that sure destroyed their industry. I'll add a bit of commentary here as well. Publishers are shell shocked from the impending demise of their business model, even if it might be 10 years or more away. When anything remotely threatening comes their way, their itchy trigger fingers unloads a asalvo in the general direction of the percieved threat.
As someone else replied to you, hard drives are not trivial to make. It's not like making chips, where all you need is a wafer fab to chug out wafers. Hard drives are very complex systems, that take a large company with a LOT of engineering resources to put together. Thus there are really only 5 companies in the world that make hard drives:
Seagate
Western Digital
Quantum / Maxtor (merged in October, I beleive)
Fujitsu
IBM (although I doubt they're actually making the drives, for some reason, although it doesn't really matter)
There may be a few other very minor manufacturers.
The implications are this: If they sign on this small list of companies, we are FUKT. Any small companies won't be able to sell at any kind of volume, and the premiums will shoot though the roof on "non-corrupted" drives.
Fortunatly, one of the few things we have on our side is that hardware manufactuers could give a damn about things like this. In fact, it's bad, because it might stifle demand. If Joe Shmoe want a 500 gig drive for his mp3s, these companies want to deliver and get his money. They have no moral qualms about what he uses it for. Same thing with ISP's and anyone else. Thats capitalism.
Take mp3 players for example...how many do you see with SDMI capabilities? How many that have SDMI enabled won't allow non-SDMI mp3s to be played? This pretty much sums it up. The time for terror isn't here yet, but it's getting closer.
Well, my wording isn't exactly correct but it's close. The cost of computing power nears zero, which I think you'd agree with. Even the cost of engineering design approach zero if you get the design for free somewhere, or buy it for cheap from someone looking to make a quick buck.
It's clearly right wing, but sure, left wing propeganda is common as well (but not nearly as common). I think it's fear mongering for people who don't know or who don't want to know any better.
Propeganda is a relative term, the meaning of it in the Us has changed over the years for reasons I don't want to get into. Really any "bending" of the truth could be called propeganda.
Take this example. I can't remember how many children die per day in Iraq, something like 2000 due to malnutrition due to the war and the embargo. Is this just left wing propeganda? Is it even true? Some are appalled by this, most don't know about it, some don't want to beleive it, some don't beleive it, some think thats just too bad, that they deserve it because Saddam is a ruthless dictator. Take your pick. The truth is tough to find without firsthand knowledge.
Lets face it, as technology improves, the cost of designing weapons approaches zero. Whether the story is true or not, it points to this fact. Lets face it, in 30, 40 years every third world country is going to have some sort of nuclear weapon. A lot of countries will have delivery systems as well. This is just a reality we will have to face. The PS2 Weapon Development Platform(tm) might be a bit much, but how hard do you think it is for Saddam to get his hands on a bunch of PC's?
If all it takes is a cluster of PS2's to make weapons, there isn't much the FBI or CIA can do. While this site reaks of far right wing propeganda (Saddam needs to be crushed and he stole your child's PS2, as well) I certainly don't support it. America needs to realize it will be much, much harder in the coming years to rule the world.
Antitechnologists, academic and other snoots, and neo-Luddites equate technology with the erosion of culture and civilization.
Indeed a lot of people do this without really knowing what they're talking about. Unfortunatly, making the same argument from the other side is no better or more impressive.
This is a neat book to give a teacher or parent muttering about all that time online, or lamenting the high culture of times past and the fact that kids have all gone to cultural Hell.
Perhaps, but frankly these people do have a point. If this book is mostly a history book as you make it out to be, this book most likely won't change any of these people's minds. They already know what technology has provided. What it doesn't provide and has taken away is what bothers them.
We need more writing on why correct implementation and scrutiny are very important when developing and integrating technology into our society, and how this is the larger problem. Simply lumping all "technology" in a box and saying it sucks is not the solution. Pointing out that public apathy and professional self censorship are a big problem is important as well. We don't have any mechanisms in our world to control tech development. Our society is engrained with the notion of profit making and growth through the rapid advancement of technology. The ones who conciously or subcounciously don't agree with this aren't going to be persuaded by a book on tech history.
I'll stick with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Heh. Sure, blame one small organization for ruining it for the rest of us. No, we're all to blame...
We want all the conveniences of life (which now days requires even more power every year) but we don't want the side effects. Basically as individuals we're promoting a selfish version of what the greens want: less pollution, but only in Our Back Yard. Some other guy's Back Yard? Might as well be glowing green for all I care, right?
So although your thesis appears valid from an American's point of view, from a Ugandan's or Korean's perspective, it's trite at best.
I know. However, I didn't want to get all worked up into a long rant about why capitalism sucks (it would be more eloquent that that statement, but you get the idea).
At a global level there is always the risk of economic meltdown due to America's (and the western worlds', really) ridiculous materialism and lack of perspective, not to mention our current implementation of capitalism. But this wasn't the article to discuss that.
"techno-capitalism" is just the current manifestation of the way American capitalism has always worked. I mean this quite literally, it's been this way all the way back to the beginning of the industrial revolution.
The best example I have is from a History of Science class I took involved railroads. Americans would build many miles of track per day, at the expense of quality, as the tracks would break often, and sometimes they even ran them on top of the snow(!). When it would melt, the track would have to be rebuilt. The British, on the other hand, took their time and built tracks that would last.
In the modern day things are even worse, because of broadcast technologies that gave rise to the advertising industry. Now companies waste money convincing you that you need product x, regardless of how good product x is and if you even need it. They do a good job of convincing, too. It has brought our economic system to a new low, in my opinion, as far as the effect on our society.
Whether or not this additude will harm the US in the long run remains to be seen. Mentioning India as a threat seems to be a stretch right now, they have a pretty limited industrial base as far as I know. Japan and Germany seem to be the obvious threats (personally I view them as healthy competition). The focus in Germany is on making a good product at the possible expense of profit. In America it's the other way around. Japan seems to have a better balance somewhere in the middle, although that doesn't explain the recession/slow growth they've had over the past 11 years.
Hopefully competition from other coutries can "keep it real" for american corps as Japan did for the automakers.
That reminds me of a situation here in MN a few years back...
Internet service was cut off for several days after a homeless guy was sleeping under a bridge...I beleive his blankets were covering some exposed electrical power equipment and a fire started. All the fiber lines nearby were melted (this is from memory, the story is probably off a bit). ALL the lines into MN at that time were through this area (maybe they still are?) so there was no net for a few days. If someone from MN remembers the exact story, post a reply:)
I think the point is that a fair amount of the net is fragile in this manner. Remember, you only have to cut the line once over any distance to prevent it from working. Obvious yeah, but people seem to forget.
As far as just engineering degrees go, yes, EE is one of the harder ones. At my school, the only major people routinely said was harder than EE was ChemE (by quite a margin, actually). A guy I knew at Cornell placed EE at #3 or #4 after applied physics, ChemE, and maybe something else.
The interesting thing at my school is that we graduated about 350 ChemE's this year, and about 120 EE's. Guess which major has 5 times as many jobs available as the other one:)
Engineers do tend to be arrogant (especially if you went to purdue:) but I try not to be...I could never act, paint, or write a good book. Our society just says we get paid more, due to supply/demand.
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The arguement that all religions are cult to some degree is fairly weak, IMO. I've learned quite a bit about Jehova's witnesses since my gf used to be one of them. I myself was raised Lutheran.
In Jehova's Witness (JW) world, they control you on several fronts. You can't have friends outside the religion. You are STRONGLY discouraged from pursuing post secondary education, arguably to make you dependant on the JW network of members if times get rough, which can happen when all you have is a low paying part time job. They take up most of your time, there are four "services" per week.
Most importantly, you can be kicked out for a number of reasons: pre-marital sex (the big one for them), smoking (I think), even voting I beleive. If you get kicked out, coupled with rule #1 from above, you have NOTHING left. When my gf left the religion (before she met me) because she didn't beleive it, she was suicidal for quite a while. She had no friends, and her parents didn't talk to her for a year. Normally if you formally leave, no one, not even your parents, can talk to you EVER AGAIN. I don't know how she made it.
My religious experience was far different. Church once a week. I had more friends outside of church than inside, who were in other religions or none at all. There was no such thing as being kicked out of the church. You could be "forgiven" for anything. Sure, part of religion is "indoctrination", but it's nothing like the mind control you see in cults.
There are books out there that have rules to determine whether a religion is cult or not. Most involve mind control, money control (which JW's don't really have), and culture control of your person. Usually if a religion meets a certain number of the rules it is considered cult.
Scientology fits most of the rules I know of. Most religions were created with good intentions, even though many have been perverted into forms of control, but scientology was always evil. It was always a for-profit venture.
CE gives you more options. At the school I went to, CE is a cross between EE and CS, so you'll take some of the junior level EE courses and cut a few CS courses. At a lot of schools, I think they have special CE courses, but the coursework is probably pretty similar to what I had in my upper level EE courses.
Now for the important part. Here is what you can do (without a lot of trouble, anyway) with each of the degrees:
CS: software (mostly app/GUI software)
CE: software, hardware, embedded software (any low level software really)
EE: software, hardware, embedded hardware
Please no flames by CS people who do jobs I didn't list, this is from what I've seen at my school.
Notice which ones allow you to do more. And yes, software companies will go for EE's and CE's. I had a few recruit me, in fact, although I wanted to go into hardware.
The saying is this: EE's can be taught software. CS's cannot be taught hardware. I'd go for CE in your case. EE and CE degrees are far more "robust" than CS degrees in my opinion. Keep this in mind, however: you won't have to choose a major or lose much time if you don't decide for sure until about the end of your second year. The coursework proabbly won't vary by more than a few classes in that timeframe.
There are a few things that can be changed. They are not in the spirit of capitalism, but capitalism isn't in the spirit of democracy anyway.
1. Media outlets cannot be owned by megacorporations. Any company shouldn't be allowed more than a small number of newspapers / tv stations / radio stations. AOL time warner owns far too many outlets which gives them huge control over pop culture.
2. Media outlets cannot be controlled by corporations that are in ANY other business. This leads to conflicts of interest.
3. A more extreme measure, media outlets cannot be for profit entities. The pressure on them to make the big corporations that advertise on their stations is far too great. Kalle Lasn, who runs adbusters magazine, is normally turned down by TV stations to run his TV ads. His ads are usually about not spending your money on crap you don't need, or reducing consumption. The reason he gets rejected? It would anger other advertisers who sells products to the public and drive them away.
"Control" of actual stories by some agency is too bit extreme to me. The things listed above would go a long way to reducing serious pressures on what goes on the air.
Just because a vast majority of the free & democratic news outlets parrot what the RIAA says doesn't make those news outlets any less free.
That's true, on some theoretical level. The problem is that many people equate free with unbiased. Of course, bias is a part of any opinion or story, but people generally view the media as being an accurate representation of what is going on in the world. Clearly, it is not, and that is unacceptable. Don't tell me to quit bitching when these pathetic media outlets blatently lie every day. Some level of integrity is needed. And yes, I also know we all have a responsibilty to get out there and help end the problem.
heh. Actually, I do know the solution, and yeah you're correct. Stuff like this just depresses me.
1) I don't buy all that many cd's nowdays, and of those I do, most are from small labels anyway. I fully embrace mp3's, and wish all artists had some sort of street performers protocol setup so I could donate money that goes to them and not some marketing machine...
2) I try to do this to some extent, often people think I'm strange since they're so brainwashed by consumer culture, however. It's easier with cd's, since the price is so rediculous and has actually gone up over the past 5 years or so.
3) Well, you can only do so much, and admittedly I haven't done any voluteer work, although I want to. I wouldn't mind doing some culture jamming.
I don't know about you, but frankly I'm sick of our "free and democratic" mass media passing along whatever Big Corporation Guy says like a puppet.
And people wonder where most of our society's problems come from. Read stories like this, with lies I can hardly believe, and the answer seems a bit clearer. How did greed ever reach such levels? I feel damn near helpless to stop crap like this.
Normally when the government seemingly sides with consumers it suprises me. However, there are industries out there who are severely slowed by "big brother" types of content control.
This would be the hardware industry, storage industry, and really any "tech" industry. If we can't move forward with technologies that generally allow the free flow of information, these industries will slow greatly, with no new products or products consumers don't want. Remember, these industries have lobbyists too, who can whisper their agenda into Mr. Hatch's ear.
It's not even a right, a right is quite similar to a guarantee. You're only given a CHANCE to profit. How is the right to vote not the same as a guarantee to vote? I don't understand the difference.
who make more money than they deserve.
:)
You know, he should be right...windows should be better than linux. All that money and power, and look what they put out. Semi-functional bloatware. I don't need to tell everyone here about all the inovation paradoxes in his statement. Too easy of a target
Frankly any product that is free, or at least costs less than what you needed before, gives more power to the individual. That, my friends, is the American spirit. THAT is democracy. The right to profit is NOT. Unfortunatly, most of America has forgotten this.
I work in the hard drive industry (scary) and there are a few monetary benefits to the company, hopefully passed on to the consumer...
Basically platter yield goes up. HD companies lose a certain % of platters when the two sides aren't parallel to each other within spec. With a one sided setup this doesn't matter and won't cut into yield. Also, since Si defects will always be there, you can gain some yield back when the defects are only on one side, and simply use the other side.
Where does the pressure come from? The "best interests" of society are typically different than what corporations want or need to stay profitable. Does it come from lobbyist groups, politicians who have large financial backing, or somewhere else? Since the stance of the EFF in my opinion is far different than what the FCC usually does (the "donation" of the HDTV frequency spectrum comes to mind), how do you deal with this? And do you have the power to push through policies that the EFF would favor?
The motley fool had a decent article a few days ago on how the situation is a combination of poorly executed deregulation, NIMBYism (or BANANAism as they call it...Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), and limits on what fuels can be used. It can be found here.
But the feature has come under fire from writers and publishers groups, which say it is an "aggressive" tactic that threatens to eat into sales of new books and take royalty money out of the pockets of their members.
HA! I can end this debate in just a few paragraphs. You know who else stated these exact words about 10 years ago? The music industry. Remember that? They wanted to make it illegal to sell used CD's, for the EXACT same reasons. They pulled out people like Garth Brooks to speak out against such terrible evils.
Lets see. Last I checked:
- Used CD stores all over the landscape
- MP3's "ruining" the world
- Record industry still recording record profits last year.
Boy, that sure destroyed their industry. I'll add a bit of commentary here as well. Publishers are shell shocked from the impending demise of their business model, even if it might be 10 years or more away. When anything remotely threatening comes their way, their itchy trigger fingers unloads a asalvo in the general direction of the percieved threat.
As someone else replied to you, hard drives are not trivial to make. It's not like making chips, where all you need is a wafer fab to chug out wafers. Hard drives are very complex systems, that take a large company with a LOT of engineering resources to put together. Thus there are really only 5 companies in the world that make hard drives:
Seagate
Western Digital
Quantum / Maxtor (merged in October, I beleive)
Fujitsu
IBM (although I doubt they're actually making the drives, for some reason, although it doesn't really matter)
There may be a few other very minor manufacturers.
The implications are this: If they sign on this small list of companies, we are FUKT. Any small companies won't be able to sell at any kind of volume, and the premiums will shoot though the roof on "non-corrupted" drives.
Fortunatly, one of the few things we have on our side is that hardware manufactuers could give a damn about things like this. In fact, it's bad, because it might stifle demand. If Joe Shmoe want a 500 gig drive for his mp3s, these companies want to deliver and get his money. They have no moral qualms about what he uses it for. Same thing with ISP's and anyone else. Thats capitalism.
Take mp3 players for example...how many do you see with SDMI capabilities? How many that have SDMI enabled won't allow non-SDMI mp3s to be played? This pretty much sums it up. The time for terror isn't here yet, but it's getting closer.
Once we have the holodeck. Then this industry is done. Might be a few years.
Well, my wording isn't exactly correct but it's close. The cost of computing power nears zero, which I think you'd agree with. Even the cost of engineering design approach zero if you get the design for free somewhere, or buy it for cheap from someone looking to make a quick buck.
It's clearly right wing, but sure, left wing propeganda is common as well (but not nearly as common). I think it's fear mongering for people who don't know or who don't want to know any better.
Propeganda is a relative term, the meaning of it in the Us has changed over the years for reasons I don't want to get into. Really any "bending" of the truth could be called propeganda.
Take this example. I can't remember how many children die per day in Iraq, something like 2000 due to malnutrition due to the war and the embargo. Is this just left wing propeganda? Is it even true? Some are appalled by this, most don't know about it, some don't want to beleive it, some don't beleive it, some think thats just too bad, that they deserve it because Saddam is a ruthless dictator. Take your pick. The truth is tough to find without firsthand knowledge.
Lets face it, as technology improves, the cost of designing weapons approaches zero. Whether the story is true or not, it points to this fact. Lets face it, in 30, 40 years every third world country is going to have some sort of nuclear weapon. A lot of countries will have delivery systems as well. This is just a reality we will have to face. The PS2 Weapon Development Platform(tm) might be a bit much, but how hard do you think it is for Saddam to get his hands on a bunch of PC's?
If all it takes is a cluster of PS2's to make weapons, there isn't much the FBI or CIA can do. While this site reaks of far right wing propeganda (Saddam needs to be crushed and he stole your child's PS2, as well) I certainly don't support it. America needs to realize it will be much, much harder in the coming years to rule the world.
Antitechnologists, academic and other snoots, and neo-Luddites equate technology with the erosion of culture and civilization.
Indeed a lot of people do this without really knowing what they're talking about. Unfortunatly, making the same argument from the other side is no better or more impressive.
This is a neat book to give a teacher or parent muttering about all that time online, or lamenting the high culture of times past and the fact that kids have all gone to cultural Hell.
Perhaps, but frankly these people do have a point. If this book is mostly a history book as you make it out to be, this book most likely won't change any of these people's minds. They already know what technology has provided. What it doesn't provide and has taken away is what bothers them.
We need more writing on why correct implementation and scrutiny are very important when developing and integrating technology into our society, and how this is the larger problem. Simply lumping all "technology" in a box and saying it sucks is not the solution. Pointing out that public apathy and professional self censorship are a big problem is important as well. We don't have any mechanisms in our world to control tech development. Our society is engrained with the notion of profit making and growth through the rapid advancement of technology. The ones who conciously or subcounciously don't agree with this aren't going to be persuaded by a book on tech history.
I'll stick with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Heh. Sure, blame one small organization for ruining it for the rest of us. No, we're all to blame...
We want all the conveniences of life (which now days requires even more power every year) but we don't want the side effects. Basically as individuals we're promoting a selfish version of what the greens want: less pollution, but only in Our Back Yard. Some other guy's Back Yard? Might as well be glowing green for all I care, right?
Who seems to be using more common sense here?
So although your thesis appears valid from an American's point of view, from a Ugandan's or Korean's perspective, it's trite at best.
I know. However, I didn't want to get all worked up into a long rant about why capitalism sucks (it would be more eloquent that that statement, but you get the idea).
At a global level there is always the risk of economic meltdown due to America's (and the western worlds', really) ridiculous materialism and lack of perspective, not to mention our current implementation of capitalism. But this wasn't the article to discuss that.
"techno-capitalism" is just the current manifestation of the way American capitalism has always worked. I mean this quite literally, it's been this way all the way back to the beginning of the industrial revolution.
The best example I have is from a History of Science class I took involved railroads. Americans would build many miles of track per day, at the expense of quality, as the tracks would break often, and sometimes they even ran them on top of the snow(!). When it would melt, the track would have to be rebuilt. The British, on the other hand, took their time and built tracks that would last.
In the modern day things are even worse, because of broadcast technologies that gave rise to the advertising industry. Now companies waste money convincing you that you need product x, regardless of how good product x is and if you even need it. They do a good job of convincing, too. It has brought our economic system to a new low, in my opinion, as far as the effect on our society.
Whether or not this additude will harm the US in the long run remains to be seen. Mentioning India as a threat seems to be a stretch right now, they have a pretty limited industrial base as far as I know. Japan and Germany seem to be the obvious threats (personally I view them as healthy competition). The focus in Germany is on making a good product at the possible expense of profit. In America it's the other way around. Japan seems to have a better balance somewhere in the middle, although that doesn't explain the recession/slow growth they've had over the past 11 years.
Hopefully competition from other coutries can "keep it real" for american corps as Japan did for the automakers.
While I completely agree with you (this will make me sound like a zealot myself, however I am not), look at the other side of the spectrum.
...without particular regard to temporal factors such as schedule, market, or even plebeian usability concerns
Most commercial software houses break these rules too. US flavored capitalism seeks to maximize profit, shorting anything else it can get away with.
It's unfortunate that noone can seem to find middle ground.
That reminds me of a situation here in MN a few years back...
:)
Internet service was cut off for several days after a homeless guy was sleeping under a bridge...I beleive his blankets were covering some exposed electrical power equipment and a fire started. All the fiber lines nearby were melted (this is from memory, the story is probably off a bit). ALL the lines into MN at that time were through this area (maybe they still are?) so there was no net for a few days. If someone from MN remembers the exact story, post a reply
I think the point is that a fair amount of the net is fragile in this manner. Remember, you only have to cut the line once over any distance to prevent it from working. Obvious yeah, but people seem to forget.
As far as just engineering degrees go, yes, EE is one of the harder ones. At my school, the only major people routinely said was harder than EE was ChemE (by quite a margin, actually). A guy I knew at Cornell placed EE at #3 or #4 after applied physics, ChemE, and maybe something else.
:)
:) but I try not to be...I could never act, paint, or write a good book. Our society just says we get paid more, due to supply/demand.
The interesting thing at my school is that we graduated about 350 ChemE's this year, and about 120 EE's. Guess which major has 5 times as many jobs available as the other one
Engineers do tend to be arrogant (especially if you went to purdue