I like Mark's comments and ideas. We just have to separate the means, the ends, and the values.
Mark is describing the ends. It's a vision for a new social structure of the future. It has a lot going for it - if we ignore for a moment how we pay for it, everyone here (I hope) will agree that it would be a Great Thing if everyone had food, clothing, shelter, quality education, and good health care. That's a good basis for a great society. If we had the choice, why would we choose to have hunger and starvation, homelessness, under-education and people dying of preventable and curable problems?
But we have to pay for it. UBI was one idea to investigate (and that's pretty close to his wording). The global worth of mankind's output is growing - mathematically, the average standard of living of the world should continue to rise over time (I see no limit in sight).
Much, much more importantly - we also have to figure out a value system around it. Mark's ideal here is a safety net to let people climb higher. That's a great thing. It can also be viewed as a motivation to not climb at all. That's a terrible thing. All social programs struggle with this fundamental issue. It doesn't mean the goals are bad. It means that when society gives, some people give back, and some people take. The ideal society happens when everyone gives and everyone gives back. Society collapses when everyone takes and nobody gives back.
Giving to the poor and needy is risky. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a higher society than one that invests in the poor and needy.
Side note: I see no better way to handle the moral issues here than in our own lives and our own homes. Do we give back when we take? Do we teach our children the value of work, progress, ambition, and selflessness? Are setting the right example ourselves and teaching others?
We can't have that utopian society unless we have utopian people to put in it.
Other side note: I'm a wealthy, small-government conservative who hates paying interest, taxes, and poorly managed, poorly used social programs. I also believe I have a responsibility to meaningfully help those who have a tougher hand to play than I do. And I struggle (a lot) to find good ways to meaningfully help.
I do believe that having more information will allow for a more accurate analysis of why people behave the way they do, that is, their motivations.
However, I am not sure that all of the observable facts in the universe about an individual will be sufficient to completely predict motivation and behavior. People are complicated - the older I get, the more introspective I get, the more I pick at and analyze and assess my own actions, the more frequently I find that I do not have clear reasons for what I do - and I learn things about myself. If I have trouble figuring out why I do what I do, how could an outsider - one who does not possess the same set of biases that I have developed myself, via my own life, choices, experiments and education - ever hope to understand me so well as to correctly declare my motivations and predict my future behavior?
But then, to restate my first claim, more information will yield better accuracy. But can everything the NSA, or google, collect about me ever be enough?
Surveillance as a topic overall is interesting because it is so resistant to black-and-white rule setting - context is everything. Now I have something to think about on my afternoon walk.:)
I think this is a fine idea, as long as the algorithm that scores the papers is publicly known. While this might initially seem like a bad idea, I think it is identical to what we have today - I remember intentionally adjusting my writing style to match teacher expectations in high school/college: some teachers liked me to parrot back facts and figures, others wanted their own theories returned to them, while still others (okay, just once in my school life) rewarded for original analytical thinking.
Since we already train students according to teacher bias of what makes a 'good' human-graded paper, it seems only fair to publish the bias that will be used to define a 'good' electronically-graded paper.
I see two ways electronic grading can fail.
(1) Students who submit poor papers which still score highly. If the AI algorithm is complicated enough that real cleverness is required, perhaps that's not a bad thing... And if the AI algorithm is easy to game, everyone will score highly and it will be obvious that the technology wasn't ready and this was a bad idea.
(2) Students who submit good papers which score poorly. Resolving this probably requires a public appeal-to-a-human-teacher process. If a large number of papers are appealed and found to be of quality, it will be obvious that the technology wasn't ready and this was a bad idea.
If after the trial, the number of overturn-by-appeals is low and the distribution of scores looks good, then mankind will have found a way to automate another (I believe) tedious task and free up more human capital and resources for more challenging and valuable pursuits, which sounds like a big win. Seems like we ought to try it and learn something.
I could not disagree more strongly.:) I think you (parent post) have a confused idea of what religion is.
"A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence." (Wikipedia.org). As a geek, I have no doubt that you (OP) have had life experiences which have led you to a set of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that help you personally relate to the rest of humanity and the universe, possibly including a sense of the Divine. And as a geek, I have no doubt that you have experimented, analyzed, observed, tested your surroundings, and developed a set of values, beliefs, and ways of relating to others and your universe which have brought you some degree of happiness and peace.
It sounds criminal not to share such lessons with your own child. Of course your child will choose for herself. But to deprive her of those things in your life which have worked for you, especially in this area, seems foolish. Share with her the best path you have found and challenge her to find a better if she can.:)
(I suppose that I, as a geek, don't really buy in to the idea of an automatically-accepted formal dogma ('brainwashing'). And that said, I am an active participant in such a formally organized religion, but that's because my own set of experiments have led me to believe that this is the best path for me. And I ever seek a path which brings me greater peace and happiness, as any geek should.)
At my workplace, college tuition can be paid for via a program of either forgiveness (for tuition paid by the company up front) or reimbursement (for tuition paid by the student up front and then reimbursed by the company). Forgiveness and reimbursement are only available based on getting reasonably good grades (B or better for both undergrad and grad work, IIRC).
I think both notions would make a ton of sense for this kind of government program. Other posters have wisely already observed that not all education is equal. Others again recommended that rather than finance the first years of college, it might be more beneficial to finance the last (to encourage those near the end to just complete their degrees and get out into the workplace).
It seems to me like with a judicious use of forgiveness/reimbursement based on successful completion of coursework (e.g., credits awarded), and a reimbursement scale based on the perceived usefulness of the class/degree being pursued (via bureau of labor statistics recommendations) would allow the government to take an active role in engineering a long term competitive workforce. Want more STEM graduates? Raise the % of reimbursement for passing STEM classes. Maybe raise the % reimbursement as well for more advanced classes (50% first year, 60% second year, 70% third year, 80% fourth year). Lower the % of reimbursement for those professions which the BLS indicates we don't need as many of as a country.
Under such a system, you can always get any degree you want, but if you do something that aligns with the government view of what will be beneficial to the country, the government will pay you something for it. It certainly makes sense to have higher subsidies for higher paying professions (in many cases, those most in demand) because they increase the future tax base the most.
As far as I can tell, we all want a more educated populous and recognize benefits for that as a whole... Maybe there are smarter ways to do it than a blank check for a couple of years of higher education.
My subject is to prove a point. Slashdot is notoriously, and regulary with good reason, quite anti-Microsoft. Would the comments and content be different if, say, we swapped Microsoft with Apache in the original article / summary? The comments would probably change just because there are more Apache apologists than Microsoft apologists here. Oh well, big deal. Plus, the subject 'Microsoft == BAD' is going to get good readership here. Know your audience.:-)
Second, I think something most people haven't covered here is that code defects vary wildly in terms of visibility and seriousness. I pretend to do software development (as a day job), and know full well that after my first code-build-test-debug iterations complete and I hit an alpha stage of functionality for some feature (it appears to work and passes my initial tests), I will likely still make Q changes per K lines of code (unknown constants to me). Some of these are actually critical, segfaults hiding in unchecked variables, potential buffer overruns, exceptions I forgot to try-catch. Others are cosmetic or for readability -- changing formatting or variable/class names to make more sense, adding comments. Others are for performance improvements or memory efficiency. I know full well many of the issues I fix will probably never be seen by any client of my code, but I fix 'em anyway, but only as often as I find them. And even for serious defects, there are definite (unknown) probabilities that my clients are going to see them.
My point here is that there's no clear principle for when the public needs to know. If it affects one in a trillion people, should it be declared in press conference? 1 in one billion? one million? 100000? 10000? Sure, there's a threshold there, but it is arbitrary and biased -- if I'm the one in 10000, I will wish that they'd talked about it; if I'm one of the other 9999, well, I don't care. And if some fellow fixing the 1 in 10000 fatal flaw finds and fixes 10 other 1 in a trillion flaws in the same area of code (and that's quite common in my experience, because bad code tends to localize well), do I really need publication on the other 10 tiny flaws? No. Just fix the one big one publicly, and spare me the details on the other 10. But post it somewhere so I can google it.
So is Microsoft evil for their bug tracking and disclosure policies? Beats me, but probably.:-) My comments above neither defend nor attack them, they're just comments.
I see throughout the comments on this page one huge common (but not universal) flaw -- almost everyone is taking it personally. There are hundreds of posts on here about all the violent games that have been played immersively by various folks who are now normal, contributing members of society that don't commit violent crimes.
It is therefore obvious that there is not a 100% causal link between violent video games and immediate violent behavior. We as a slashdot readership seem generally capable of distinguishing between appropriate game behavior and appropriate real life behavior.
That's hardly the point, though. The concern behind all of this is that there may be people who *are* predisposed to being manipulated by video games, just by how their brains are wired, their psychological development and past, their baggage. What if 1 in 10000 people are, for whatever reason, unable to manage distinctions between immersive violent games and real life? What if it is just 1 in 100000, or 1 in 1 million?
The counter is that, 'Well, these people have violent tendencies anyway.' Maybe true. But rather than just being the fistfighting schoolyard bully, maybe they're impressed with how cool an automatic shotgun can be, or the idea of using a chainsaw is really 'sweet'. At the very least, if someone is susceptible to the suggestions of video games applying to real life, it can't be good for everyone else to have that individual be introduced to new, exciting, varied methods of killing and maiming other people.
If you're 'normal' with games, congratulations, you are in the large majority. I'm not worried about the large majority. I'm worried about the very very small minority who may be influenceable to doing very tragic things.
Do I believe video games are a problem for the vast majority of people? I don't doubt they have effects, but I strongly believe almost everyone can cope with them. Do I think universal legislation is the answer? Not really, the challenge is identifying that very small minority *before* they do something catastrophic, and that's a big challenge. Do I have a solution? No. Do we need one? Yes.
I am a little bit concerned with Google going tight-lipped, and I'll tell you why. They're relatively new.
I don't believe that companies should *have* to give out expectations and forecasts for the coming months to the public, however, Google is still a young company, and while they've had quite a ride at the outset, there are sides of Google still to be determined. Specifically, is Google the kind of company that paints a rosy picture to the world while in fact internally things are going somewhere warm in a handbasket? Or will they be forthright and honest in their downtimes?
It's easy to be open and honest when things are on the up and up, and it seems harder to do it in downtimes. Every company has down times, and if they're lucky, some up times too.
My point is, I think Google needs to earn more investor trust. I don't think anyone has any trouble feeling confident with Berkshire-Hathaway because BH has been around quite a while, and it's pretty clear how that company does its business, in good times and bad. I like Google, and I want them to prove to me and other investors that they're going to run the place with integrity. Give me solid honesty during the downtimes for a few years, and then you'll have earned my trust and more of my money.
I just think it is scary when such a new company suddenly goes quiet, even when they're as cool as Google is.
First, disclaimer. I have used AOL in the long distant past, and if it is still the same as it used to be, well, $-40 might be the right monthly rate (that is, they pay you enough to replace the computer they screw up).
Second... my parents (mid 50's aged) used to be stuck with a high cost ISP through a deal they got at work. When their contract expired, they switched to your average nation $10 / month dialup ISP (Qwest has decided their neighborhood doesn't warrant DSL, although they live in a suburb and cable is readily available, but overpriced for their budget).
This new ISP, unlike the old expensive one, is awful. Heaven help you if you want to send UDP traffic because it gets dropped, constantly (and on dialup, that is in fact the end of the world). Disconnections every 20 minutes, minimum. Plus, a real PITA interface with 'pop-up' blockers and 'virus scanners' that take down the web connection with frightening frequency while in fact neither blocking popups nor catching viruses and spyware. I know because, as most of you, I get the call to fix it when it is broken, and I *used* to be able to play games like Starcraft (pure UDP) with my little brother, back in the day...
This isn't just a complaint post, though. There's a market hiding in there. Specifically, I would consider recommending an ISP who charged more money in exchange for services that were actually valuable. Like ISP to backbone latency guarantees, or never a dropped packet on their network (which requires quite a bit of expensive redundant hardware and a willingness to not sell all available bandwidth), or any of a host of other non-intrusive services. You want to scan for viruses? Scan the packets before they get to me. A popup blocker? I use a *real* webrowser, I don't need it. Your ridiculous dialer app that wraps internet explorer? Just give me a phone number and an 8 line instruction page for setting up a modem shortcut.
For the right price, it *must* be possible to actually provide a true, clean, non-intrusive high quality connection at the advertised speed. Is that AOL? Probably not. But it if existed, it would be worth considering, even at $26 for dialup. The older I get, the more I am interested in exchanging my money for quality goods and services. I care about price, but I care more about what I'm getting than how much I'm getting it for. I am willing to pay more to avoid having MSN, AOL, Earthlink or any other such ISP manage my broadband connection, from experience with each of those.
Is there such a thing as a 'luxury' ISP? Maybe there should be.
I think a good alternative, severally submitted, is to simply use odometer numbers for taxes.
A better option IMO that obviates the need to regularly register your mileage, is simply to raise automotive taxes. Amortize up front the expected taxes on the entire automobile when purchased new -- obviously the government thinks it knows how much it should charge per mile of roadway use, so simply multiply by the expected lifetime of the car. If you sell the car later / trade in, you deserve to get back the amortized difference. No loss of privacy, no checkups, no reports, no registrations, no problems. And because many cars don't make it to their guestimated lifetimes (accidents / etc.) the government could probably come out ahead on it. You could even cut gas taxes, so buying the car is $EXPENSIVE$ but owning and operating gets cheaper. Since most people consider cars to be big-ticket items anyway... Sure, we would need a transition plan, maybe ramp up cost per mile on the car over the next 20 years, and poof, adjusted consumers, funded highways, privacy maintained.
I don't know what the big deal is. I watched a couple of documentaries back in the 80's about guys who ran around with unlicensed nuclear accelerators on their backs, and it was fine. They mentioned something about 'total protonic reversal', but even when they did that intentionally, it didn't seem like a big deal. And that was New York, not the middle of nowhere, Alaska.
I don't really know about SOI or hypertransporting, but I am pretty confident in claiming that Intel never wanted to put in an on-die memory controller -- they preferred giving customers the flexibility to use their processors with all kinds of memory.
I understand your point, but I don't think you can claim AMD is beating Intel in a race that Intel isn't running in. I don't know if this same point applies to SOI and hypertransport or not.
You could equally claim that Intel has a several years' edge on AMD in hyperthreading, but it is rather meaningless, because AMD doesn't do care to do hyperthreading, as far as I can tell.
I am not a lawyer, so maybe someone can explain this to me. I thought that the First Amendment guaranteed the right to freedom of expression, but not necessarily some sense of a right to an audience. Since there is no restriction (as far as I can tell) on what kind of software is being produced (the right to express), how does the first Amendment apply to people attempting to gain access to that expression?
I think this is an interesting idea. In fact, I think we should do both. I mean, seriously, there will always be adult content in the general forum, much like there will always be safe-for-children content in the general forum. But if the internet had a good content oriented structure that went a little farther than.org,.com,.gov, etc., how would that be a bad thing? It would only be easier to find whatever you're looking for, be that pornographic material or cookie recipes. How is that bad?
I grant you, the policies around them definitely need fleshing out. But I expect that if it came out that having a.xxx suffix on your site generated more traffic and revenue, that is, people were just spending all of their porn time and money on those sites because they were easier to find / browse / whatever, that there would be a mass voluntary migration anyway. Same thing with a.kids domain, or a.sports domain, or a.computers domain, or any other content-oriented domain. Throw in a domain specific google extension, and I think it's a significant win-win-win-win for all parties.
You're at +4 insightful at this posting, and if I had the points, I would push it to 5. I am against pornography, and am in favor of good ideas for making it easy for those who want it to get it, and easy for those who don't want it to not get it.
That said, you have here the best arguments I've read on this page for why this solution isn't the best one. I think it is still better than nothing, but unless your issues are addressed, the proposal will fail.
As one of those 'zealots', I feel like responding here. It is not as if people of real religious convinction sit around plotting how to make people who disagree with them suffer (well, some might, but none I know). Rather, we are simply expressing our deep convictions that pornography is harmful to society and those who use it.
You don't have to agree with me. The absolute basis of my beliefs is my personal right to choose my beliefs, and I'm happy to extend that to other people. Do I believe I have the right to force other people to accept my beliefs? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Do I believe I have the right not to have other people force their beliefs on me? You bet I do.
I'm certain there are insane people on both sides of this issue. I'm also convinced that there are rational, good people who are trying to make of their lives the best they can on both sides. The fact that I can express what appears to be a minority opinion here, on a public forum, without being afraid of someone firebombing my house is what makes our governmental system good in the first place.
I'm in favor of the.xxx tld, because it makes it easier to choose. If you don't want pornography in your internet experience, it will be easier to avoid after this (and yes, I've certainly found offensive content against my will before). And if you want pornography in your experience, it will be easier to find. I'm having trouble finding a moral reason for this to be a bad idea from either point of view.
I understand your point, and it is a good one. In the perfectly free universe, people would be able to truly do anything they wanted to (and at the basis of pretty much any relgion that is worth its beans, IMHO, has freedom of choice at the bottom of it).
The problem is that people's actions affect other people. We as a society have been able to clearly differentiate consequences from one person's choice to murder another, as an extreme example.
Now, obviously, use of pornography doesn't directly lead 100% of the time to the same consequences as a murder. In fact, the reason this is a debate is because the consequences of pornography on *other people* are turning out to be really really hard to measure. Is it true that violent sex offenders have strong correlations to pornography use? Absolutely. Is the reverse true? Well, uh, maybe, maybe not. There seem to be plenty of people who are fans of pornography who appear to live societally acceptable lives, and plenty of people who are fans of pornography who don't.
My first point then is that unless you completely live in true isolation, you exchange some of your freedoms (right to murder) for the benefits of societal life, so a pure 'I want more freedom' argument doesn't work here. Second, this is an issue because society hasn't established one way or the other how it feels about pornography. Some people think it is generally harmless, others disagree. I personally believe that it is a bad influence on people, but I certainly have no right to force people to act according to my beliefs, outside of the mechanisms which society has enforced in the first place to do just that (lobby my congressman, express my opinions in first amendment protected speech, etc.).
What should happen? I don't know. If it was an easy question, it would already have been answered.
I think the parent here has hit the core of the matter soundly -- that the internet is a tool which, with very few exceptions, allows us to do pretty much everything we used to do before it existed, online.
However, I do have some points of disagreement -- there is still a valid addiction issue for things that can *not* be done outside of the internet; the internet isn't purely a tool for things we used to be able to do manually. There are aspects to internet life living that aren't available without it. Additionally, the internet has a power, its goal really, to make tasks in real life easier and faster.
Cases in point -- if you have a gambling addiction, now you don't have to find people to play poker / craps / roulette / go fish with -- they'll come to you, if you set up a virtual table at somegamblingsite.com.
A more personal example -- my wife wishes I was more interested in board and card games than I am. I say I am ruined by online multiplayer gaming, because I can interact with the same people in a way that is meaningful for me, in a universe made available via the internet (and in this case, eve-online, curse its beautiful glories) that is far more rich, intense, and immersive than the best that any board or card game I've encountered can offer. There's no way I (personally) will ever get addicted to Trivial Pursuit, but I'm hookable on these other game styles.
The internet really shouldn't count as addictive in itself -- there may be people who are truly addicted to simply making TCP/IP connections to other computers, but that's got to be rare. The real issue is with how the internet fuels other addictions by making feeding that addiction easier, faster, more efficient, and the capabilities without analog in the offline world (MMORPGs, for example) that create new opportunities for addictions.
So I agree with those who think 'internet addiction' is just a panacea term behind which the more meaningful names are hiding. I also believe that there are new kinds of addictions that didn't exist before because of the internet.
I use firefox too, but I think it fair to point out that it is a mathematical certaintly that eventually a similar 0-day exploit will be found in firefox.
Point of note, I think that the firefox development model may be more robust / better able to deal with it / reduce the likelihood of such issues in the first place. But firefox isn't immune to this sort of thing, either.
I wonder if perhaps our society puts too much emphasis on the wrong things in education. Reading the comments on this page, it is clear that I think that many slashdot readers do. There have been many posts and much discussion about people with fantastic mental skill levels (pretty hefty IQ numbers), and their experiences.
While I certainly admire / envy such folks, I prefer here to take a more utilitarian approach, especially when we're talking about socialized government tax dollar supported educational systems.
What good is having a high IQ, really? Admittedly, a few truly brilliant people have changed the history of the world through exciting theories and discoveries. But that few is quite a small few. Clearly, in an elementary school of 500 children, there aren't going to be 100 such individuals. Probably not even one. And yet these 500 children need to grow up to be useful, contributing members of society, or at least a hefty fraction of them, or society is doomed (leech vs. contributor can't grow to be a very large ratio if society is to continue).
I think society has regressed a bit. Life is so convenient and so easy for so many, at least in the united states I'm familiar with. Not many hundred years ago, people had 80 hour workweeks on the farm or at similar labor, and that was how it was, and most importantly, I think, the children were involved, rather than being prohibited from working. I think the idea that the students of today can come home from school, knock out an hour or two (at best, for the vast majority) of homework, and play 3 hours of XBox and watch 3 hours of TV before going back to bed is killing society. The need for brilliance, in my opinion, is far overshadowed by the need for people who are willing and able to work, and work hard, push themselves, and make use of what they have at their disposal, both in terms of physical resources and innate capabilities.
I know lots of intelligent people (I sometimes fancy myself one). But I'm sitting here typing a slashdot post because I'm too lazy to better my mind (I have a solid C++ textbook just begging me to do some exercises). I have a comfortable, reasonably lucrative full-time job, and have almost finished an MS in CS. And I still only do what I have to to get by. And pretty much everyone I know does the same in my upper-middle-to-middle class suburbian circle of friends.
My point here is that society doesn't need more true geniuses. It needs more people of character and work ethic. And really, I think the value of work for its own good, rather than purely for money, is one of the least taught and most needed principles. Now that I'm out in the real world and practically finished with schooling, I find that what really matters at work, etc., is the ability to show up for work, and work, do the job, and do it well. The people who do that succeed, by and large, and the people who continue to get by, as the educational system promotes (I think), find themselves in a different place than they expected.
Your experience may be (and likely is) different than mine. But one thing seems clear to me -- innate brilliance is nothing compared to how it is used. How do we teach that?
I think you are dead on. I would add a few things.
1. It seems to be pretty much ignored thus far, but the U.S. definitely has state sponsored higher education. I claim this, because pick a state, put "University of" in front of the name, and wham, you have the name of a real university, which probably receives a lot of funding, grants tuition discounts to in-state residents, etc., etc.
2. The tax issue -- let's get this straight. If you have a Ph.D. in the maths and/or sciences area, let's just pull a number out of nowhere. You have a 'right' to command a wage near $75K, say (more or less, depending on the field, but yeah). Now, let's suppose you're Jimmy, the 'average' American citizen. Wait! You only make $45K. Why will you be excited to pay for some kid to go to college so he can make more with your money? That's going to be an exciting bill to pass... Why would you vote for someone who takes that kind of money from you?
3. The prestige factor -- let's suppose we jack up taxes so that anyone who wants to go to a PhD program can afford to. Well, that's a nice sentiment. Then what? The first response is probably that anyone without a PhD gets the shaft, both in finding jobs and in compensation, because now PhDs are a dime a dozen. Since they are a resource in greater supply, demand goes down, as does compensation. Suddenly, the average citizen has extra letters to put to their name, but their standard of living probably doesn't significantly change as a whole.
The wonder and curse of the free market system is that people will pay what a degree is worth for people who have it (compare all those jokes about engineers and liberal arts majors involving asking for wanting fries with that). If there was a huge shortage of qualified PhD holders, having a PhD would be like a ticket to big money, and there would be huge incentive to get them. I don't see that as being the case -- in our society, if you have one, you make more, but not a ton more (in fact, I remember being counseled when graduating with a BS in CS that pursuing an MS or a PhD full time was not cost effective, as you never made up the time * salary in terms of the difference in remuneration went).
If this was really an issue, it would correct itself. What we *should* be concerned about is if big tech companies bring foreign PhDs into the states to do their research, and I don't see that happening much, other than those that are in fact better and brighter than the American counterparts. Free market wins again.
The poster observed that 'we have to bite this bullet sometime.' Why is that? I know right now I could wander all over this lovely internet and find useful software (especially Windows stuff) ready to go for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2K/XP... Why does that have to end?
This is presented in a 'there is no choice' light, when really, it should be presented in a 'Microsoft is going to force people to upgrade' light. I believe they could build not x64 based stuff. They choose not to because it benefits them.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but I think blaming misunderstandings about technology for business decisions gets people nowhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I like Mark's comments and ideas. We just have to separate the means, the ends, and the values.
Mark is describing the ends. It's a vision for a new social structure of the future. It has a lot going for it - if we ignore for a moment how we pay for it, everyone here (I hope) will agree that it would be a Great Thing if everyone had food, clothing, shelter, quality education, and good health care. That's a good basis for a great society. If we had the choice, why would we choose to have hunger and starvation, homelessness, under-education and people dying of preventable and curable problems?
But we have to pay for it. UBI was one idea to investigate (and that's pretty close to his wording). The global worth of mankind's output is growing - mathematically, the average standard of living of the world should continue to rise over time (I see no limit in sight).
Much, much more importantly - we also have to figure out a value system around it. Mark's ideal here is a safety net to let people climb higher. That's a great thing. It can also be viewed as a motivation to not climb at all. That's a terrible thing. All social programs struggle with this fundamental issue. It doesn't mean the goals are bad. It means that when society gives, some people give back, and some people take. The ideal society happens when everyone gives and everyone gives back. Society collapses when everyone takes and nobody gives back.
Giving to the poor and needy is risky. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a higher society than one that invests in the poor and needy.
Side note: I see no better way to handle the moral issues here than in our own lives and our own homes. Do we give back when we take? Do we teach our children the value of work, progress, ambition, and selflessness? Are setting the right example ourselves and teaching others?
We can't have that utopian society unless we have utopian people to put in it.
Other side note: I'm a wealthy, small-government conservative who hates paying interest, taxes, and poorly managed, poorly used social programs. I also believe I have a responsibility to meaningfully help those who have a tougher hand to play than I do. And I struggle (a lot) to find good ways to meaningfully help.
A fascinating read. Thanks for sharing.
:)
I do believe that having more information will allow for a more accurate analysis of why people behave the way they do, that is, their motivations.
However, I am not sure that all of the observable facts in the universe about an individual will be sufficient to completely predict motivation and behavior. People are complicated - the older I get, the more introspective I get, the more I pick at and analyze and assess my own actions, the more frequently I find that I do not have clear reasons for what I do - and I learn things about myself. If I have trouble figuring out why I do what I do, how could an outsider - one who does not possess the same set of biases that I have developed myself, via my own life, choices, experiments and education - ever hope to understand me so well as to correctly declare my motivations and predict my future behavior?
But then, to restate my first claim, more information will yield better accuracy. But can everything the NSA, or google, collect about me ever be enough?
Surveillance as a topic overall is interesting because it is so resistant to black-and-white rule setting - context is everything. Now I have something to think about on my afternoon walk.
I think this is a fine idea, as long as the algorithm that scores the papers is publicly known. While this might initially seem like a bad idea, I think it is identical to what we have today - I remember intentionally adjusting my writing style to match teacher expectations in high school/college: some teachers liked me to parrot back facts and figures, others wanted their own theories returned to them, while still others (okay, just once in my school life) rewarded for original analytical thinking.
Since we already train students according to teacher bias of what makes a 'good' human-graded paper, it seems only fair to publish the bias that will be used to define a 'good' electronically-graded paper.
I see two ways electronic grading can fail.
(1) Students who submit poor papers which still score highly. If the AI algorithm is complicated enough that real cleverness is required, perhaps that's not a bad thing... And if the AI algorithm is easy to game, everyone will score highly and it will be obvious that the technology wasn't ready and this was a bad idea.
(2) Students who submit good papers which score poorly. Resolving this probably requires a public appeal-to-a-human-teacher process. If a large number of papers are appealed and found to be of quality, it will be obvious that the technology wasn't ready and this was a bad idea.
If after the trial, the number of overturn-by-appeals is low and the distribution of scores looks good, then mankind will have found a way to automate another (I believe) tedious task and free up more human capital and resources for more challenging and valuable pursuits, which sounds like a big win. Seems like we ought to try it and learn something.
I could not disagree more strongly. :) I think you (parent post) have a confused idea of what religion is.
:)
"A religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence." (Wikipedia.org). As a geek, I have no doubt that you (OP) have had life experiences which have led you to a set of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that help you personally relate to the rest of humanity and the universe, possibly including a sense of the Divine. And as a geek, I have no doubt that you have experimented, analyzed, observed, tested your surroundings, and developed a set of values, beliefs, and ways of relating to others and your universe which have brought you some degree of happiness and peace.
It sounds criminal not to share such lessons with your own child. Of course your child will choose for herself. But to deprive her of those things in your life which have worked for you, especially in this area, seems foolish. Share with her the best path you have found and challenge her to find a better if she can.
(I suppose that I, as a geek, don't really buy in to the idea of an automatically-accepted formal dogma ('brainwashing'). And that said, I am an active participant in such a formally organized religion, but that's because my own set of experiments have led me to believe that this is the best path for me. And I ever seek a path which brings me greater peace and happiness, as any geek should.)
At my workplace, college tuition can be paid for via a program of either forgiveness (for tuition paid by the company up front) or reimbursement (for tuition paid by the student up front and then reimbursed by the company). Forgiveness and reimbursement are only available based on getting reasonably good grades (B or better for both undergrad and grad work, IIRC).
I think both notions would make a ton of sense for this kind of government program. Other posters have wisely already observed that not all education is equal. Others again recommended that rather than finance the first years of college, it might be more beneficial to finance the last (to encourage those near the end to just complete their degrees and get out into the workplace).
It seems to me like with a judicious use of forgiveness/reimbursement based on successful completion of coursework (e.g., credits awarded), and a reimbursement scale based on the perceived usefulness of the class/degree being pursued (via bureau of labor statistics recommendations) would allow the government to take an active role in engineering a long term competitive workforce. Want more STEM graduates? Raise the % of reimbursement for passing STEM classes. Maybe raise the % reimbursement as well for more advanced classes (50% first year, 60% second year, 70% third year, 80% fourth year). Lower the % of reimbursement for those professions which the BLS indicates we don't need as many of as a country.
Under such a system, you can always get any degree you want, but if you do something that aligns with the government view of what will be beneficial to the country, the government will pay you something for it. It certainly makes sense to have higher subsidies for higher paying professions (in many cases, those most in demand) because they increase the future tax base the most.
As far as I can tell, we all want a more educated populous and recognize benefits for that as a whole... Maybe there are smarter ways to do it than a blank check for a couple of years of higher education.
I for one welcome our new centrifuge generated superchicken overlords.
That has to be the single most silly sentence I've read in a loong time. Laughed right out loud at that, I did. Thanks. :)
Shouldn't this article have been titled, "Plan for cloaking device uncloaked?" Am I the only one who appreciates a painful pun around here?
Second, I think something most people haven't covered here is that code defects vary wildly in terms of visibility and seriousness. I pretend to do software development (as a day job), and know full well that after my first code-build-test-debug iterations complete and I hit an alpha stage of functionality for some feature (it appears to work and passes my initial tests), I will likely still make Q changes per K lines of code (unknown constants to me). Some of these are actually critical, segfaults hiding in unchecked variables, potential buffer overruns, exceptions I forgot to try-catch. Others are cosmetic or for readability -- changing formatting or variable/class names to make more sense, adding comments. Others are for performance improvements or memory efficiency. I know full well many of the issues I fix will probably never be seen by any client of my code, but I fix 'em anyway, but only as often as I find them. And even for serious defects, there are definite (unknown) probabilities that my clients are going to see them.
My point here is that there's no clear principle for when the public needs to know. If it affects one in a trillion people, should it be declared in press conference? 1 in one billion? one million? 100000? 10000? Sure, there's a threshold there, but it is arbitrary and biased -- if I'm the one in 10000, I will wish that they'd talked about it; if I'm one of the other 9999, well, I don't care. And if some fellow fixing the 1 in 10000 fatal flaw finds and fixes 10 other 1 in a trillion flaws in the same area of code (and that's quite common in my experience, because bad code tends to localize well), do I really need publication on the other 10 tiny flaws? No. Just fix the one big one publicly, and spare me the details on the other 10. But post it somewhere so I can google it.
So is Microsoft evil for their bug tracking and disclosure policies? Beats me, but probably. :-) My comments above neither defend nor attack them, they're just comments.
I'll go out on a limb here and say no more than 1.
It is therefore obvious that there is not a 100% causal link between violent video games and immediate violent behavior. We as a slashdot readership seem generally capable of distinguishing between appropriate game behavior and appropriate real life behavior.
That's hardly the point, though. The concern behind all of this is that there may be people who *are* predisposed to being manipulated by video games, just by how their brains are wired, their psychological development and past, their baggage. What if 1 in 10000 people are, for whatever reason, unable to manage distinctions between immersive violent games and real life? What if it is just 1 in 100000, or 1 in 1 million?
The counter is that, 'Well, these people have violent tendencies anyway.' Maybe true. But rather than just being the fistfighting schoolyard bully, maybe they're impressed with how cool an automatic shotgun can be, or the idea of using a chainsaw is really 'sweet'. At the very least, if someone is susceptible to the suggestions of video games applying to real life, it can't be good for everyone else to have that individual be introduced to new, exciting, varied methods of killing and maiming other people.
If you're 'normal' with games, congratulations, you are in the large majority. I'm not worried about the large majority. I'm worried about the very very small minority who may be influenceable to doing very tragic things.
Do I believe video games are a problem for the vast majority of people? I don't doubt they have effects, but I strongly believe almost everyone can cope with them. Do I think universal legislation is the answer? Not really, the challenge is identifying that very small minority *before* they do something catastrophic, and that's a big challenge. Do I have a solution? No. Do we need one? Yes.
I don't believe that companies should *have* to give out expectations and forecasts for the coming months to the public, however, Google is still a young company, and while they've had quite a ride at the outset, there are sides of Google still to be determined. Specifically, is Google the kind of company that paints a rosy picture to the world while in fact internally things are going somewhere warm in a handbasket? Or will they be forthright and honest in their downtimes?
It's easy to be open and honest when things are on the up and up, and it seems harder to do it in downtimes. Every company has down times, and if they're lucky, some up times too.
My point is, I think Google needs to earn more investor trust. I don't think anyone has any trouble feeling confident with Berkshire-Hathaway because BH has been around quite a while, and it's pretty clear how that company does its business, in good times and bad. I like Google, and I want them to prove to me and other investors that they're going to run the place with integrity. Give me solid honesty during the downtimes for a few years, and then you'll have earned my trust and more of my money.
I just think it is scary when such a new company suddenly goes quiet, even when they're as cool as Google is.
Second... my parents (mid 50's aged) used to be stuck with a high cost ISP through a deal they got at work. When their contract expired, they switched to your average nation $10 / month dialup ISP (Qwest has decided their neighborhood doesn't warrant DSL, although they live in a suburb and cable is readily available, but overpriced for their budget).
This new ISP, unlike the old expensive one, is awful. Heaven help you if you want to send UDP traffic because it gets dropped, constantly (and on dialup, that is in fact the end of the world). Disconnections every 20 minutes, minimum. Plus, a real PITA interface with 'pop-up' blockers and 'virus scanners' that take down the web connection with frightening frequency while in fact neither blocking popups nor catching viruses and spyware. I know because, as most of you, I get the call to fix it when it is broken, and I *used* to be able to play games like Starcraft (pure UDP) with my little brother, back in the day...
This isn't just a complaint post, though. There's a market hiding in there. Specifically, I would consider recommending an ISP who charged more money in exchange for services that were actually valuable. Like ISP to backbone latency guarantees, or never a dropped packet on their network (which requires quite a bit of expensive redundant hardware and a willingness to not sell all available bandwidth), or any of a host of other non-intrusive services. You want to scan for viruses? Scan the packets before they get to me. A popup blocker? I use a *real* webrowser, I don't need it. Your ridiculous dialer app that wraps internet explorer? Just give me a phone number and an 8 line instruction page for setting up a modem shortcut.
For the right price, it *must* be possible to actually provide a true, clean, non-intrusive high quality connection at the advertised speed. Is that AOL? Probably not. But it if existed, it would be worth considering, even at $26 for dialup. The older I get, the more I am interested in exchanging my money for quality goods and services. I care about price, but I care more about what I'm getting than how much I'm getting it for. I am willing to pay more to avoid having MSN, AOL, Earthlink or any other such ISP manage my broadband connection, from experience with each of those.
Is there such a thing as a 'luxury' ISP? Maybe there should be.
A better option IMO that obviates the need to regularly register your mileage, is simply to raise automotive taxes. Amortize up front the expected taxes on the entire automobile when purchased new -- obviously the government thinks it knows how much it should charge per mile of roadway use, so simply multiply by the expected lifetime of the car. If you sell the car later / trade in, you deserve to get back the amortized difference. No loss of privacy, no checkups, no reports, no registrations, no problems. And because many cars don't make it to their guestimated lifetimes (accidents / etc.) the government could probably come out ahead on it. You could even cut gas taxes, so buying the car is $EXPENSIVE$ but owning and operating gets cheaper. Since most people consider cars to be big-ticket items anyway... Sure, we would need a transition plan, maybe ramp up cost per mile on the car over the next 20 years, and poof, adjusted consumers, funded highways, privacy maintained.
Seems like the easiest solution to me.
I don't know what the big deal is. I watched a couple of documentaries back in the 80's about guys who ran around with unlicensed nuclear accelerators on their backs, and it was fine. They mentioned something about 'total protonic reversal', but even when they did that intentionally, it didn't seem like a big deal. And that was New York, not the middle of nowhere, Alaska.
I understand your point, but I don't think you can claim AMD is beating Intel in a race that Intel isn't running in. I don't know if this same point applies to SOI and hypertransport or not.
You could equally claim that Intel has a several years' edge on AMD in hyperthreading, but it is rather meaningless, because AMD doesn't do care to do hyperthreading, as far as I can tell.
I am not a lawyer, so maybe someone can explain this to me. I thought that the First Amendment guaranteed the right to freedom of expression, but not necessarily some sense of a right to an audience. Since there is no restriction (as far as I can tell) on what kind of software is being produced (the right to express), how does the first Amendment apply to people attempting to gain access to that expression?
I grant you, the policies around them definitely need fleshing out. But I expect that if it came out that having a .xxx suffix on your site generated more traffic and revenue, that is, people were just spending all of their porn time and money on those sites because they were easier to find / browse / whatever, that there would be a mass voluntary migration anyway. Same thing with a .kids domain, or a .sports domain, or a .computers domain, or any other content-oriented domain. Throw in a domain specific google extension, and I think it's a significant win-win-win-win for all parties.
That said, you have here the best arguments I've read on this page for why this solution isn't the best one. I think it is still better than nothing, but unless your issues are addressed, the proposal will fail.
You don't have to agree with me. The absolute basis of my beliefs is my personal right to choose my beliefs, and I'm happy to extend that to other people. Do I believe I have the right to force other people to accept my beliefs? Of course not, that's ridiculous. Do I believe I have the right not to have other people force their beliefs on me? You bet I do.
I'm certain there are insane people on both sides of this issue. I'm also convinced that there are rational, good people who are trying to make of their lives the best they can on both sides. The fact that I can express what appears to be a minority opinion here, on a public forum, without being afraid of someone firebombing my house is what makes our governmental system good in the first place.
I'm in favor of the .xxx tld, because it makes it easier to choose. If you don't want pornography in your internet experience, it will be easier to avoid after this (and yes, I've certainly found offensive content against my will before). And if you want pornography in your experience, it will be easier to find. I'm having trouble finding a moral reason for this to be a bad idea from either point of view.
The problem is that people's actions affect other people. We as a society have been able to clearly differentiate consequences from one person's choice to murder another, as an extreme example.
Now, obviously, use of pornography doesn't directly lead 100% of the time to the same consequences as a murder. In fact, the reason this is a debate is because the consequences of pornography on *other people* are turning out to be really really hard to measure. Is it true that violent sex offenders have strong correlations to pornography use? Absolutely. Is the reverse true? Well, uh, maybe, maybe not. There seem to be plenty of people who are fans of pornography who appear to live societally acceptable lives, and plenty of people who are fans of pornography who don't.
My first point then is that unless you completely live in true isolation, you exchange some of your freedoms (right to murder) for the benefits of societal life, so a pure 'I want more freedom' argument doesn't work here. Second, this is an issue because society hasn't established one way or the other how it feels about pornography. Some people think it is generally harmless, others disagree. I personally believe that it is a bad influence on people, but I certainly have no right to force people to act according to my beliefs, outside of the mechanisms which society has enforced in the first place to do just that (lobby my congressman, express my opinions in first amendment protected speech, etc.).
What should happen? I don't know. If it was an easy question, it would already have been answered.
However, I do have some points of disagreement -- there is still a valid addiction issue for things that can *not* be done outside of the internet; the internet isn't purely a tool for things we used to be able to do manually. There are aspects to internet life living that aren't available without it. Additionally, the internet has a power, its goal really, to make tasks in real life easier and faster.
Cases in point -- if you have a gambling addiction, now you don't have to find people to play poker / craps / roulette / go fish with -- they'll come to you, if you set up a virtual table at somegamblingsite.com.
A more personal example -- my wife wishes I was more interested in board and card games than I am. I say I am ruined by online multiplayer gaming, because I can interact with the same people in a way that is meaningful for me, in a universe made available via the internet (and in this case, eve-online, curse its beautiful glories) that is far more rich, intense, and immersive than the best that any board or card game I've encountered can offer. There's no way I (personally) will ever get addicted to Trivial Pursuit, but I'm hookable on these other game styles.
The internet really shouldn't count as addictive in itself -- there may be people who are truly addicted to simply making TCP/IP connections to other computers, but that's got to be rare. The real issue is with how the internet fuels other addictions by making feeding that addiction easier, faster, more efficient, and the capabilities without analog in the offline world (MMORPGs, for example) that create new opportunities for addictions.
So I agree with those who think 'internet addiction' is just a panacea term behind which the more meaningful names are hiding. I also believe that there are new kinds of addictions that didn't exist before because of the internet.
Point of note, I think that the firefox development model may be more robust / better able to deal with it / reduce the likelihood of such issues in the first place. But firefox isn't immune to this sort of thing, either.
While I certainly admire / envy such folks, I prefer here to take a more utilitarian approach, especially when we're talking about socialized government tax dollar supported educational systems.
What good is having a high IQ, really? Admittedly, a few truly brilliant people have changed the history of the world through exciting theories and discoveries. But that few is quite a small few. Clearly, in an elementary school of 500 children, there aren't going to be 100 such individuals. Probably not even one. And yet these 500 children need to grow up to be useful, contributing members of society, or at least a hefty fraction of them, or society is doomed (leech vs. contributor can't grow to be a very large ratio if society is to continue).
I think society has regressed a bit. Life is so convenient and so easy for so many, at least in the united states I'm familiar with. Not many hundred years ago, people had 80 hour workweeks on the farm or at similar labor, and that was how it was, and most importantly, I think, the children were involved, rather than being prohibited from working. I think the idea that the students of today can come home from school, knock out an hour or two (at best, for the vast majority) of homework, and play 3 hours of XBox and watch 3 hours of TV before going back to bed is killing society. The need for brilliance, in my opinion, is far overshadowed by the need for people who are willing and able to work, and work hard, push themselves, and make use of what they have at their disposal, both in terms of physical resources and innate capabilities.
I know lots of intelligent people (I sometimes fancy myself one). But I'm sitting here typing a slashdot post because I'm too lazy to better my mind (I have a solid C++ textbook just begging me to do some exercises). I have a comfortable, reasonably lucrative full-time job, and have almost finished an MS in CS. And I still only do what I have to to get by. And pretty much everyone I know does the same in my upper-middle-to-middle class suburbian circle of friends.
My point here is that society doesn't need more true geniuses. It needs more people of character and work ethic. And really, I think the value of work for its own good, rather than purely for money, is one of the least taught and most needed principles. Now that I'm out in the real world and practically finished with schooling, I find that what really matters at work, etc., is the ability to show up for work, and work, do the job, and do it well. The people who do that succeed, by and large, and the people who continue to get by, as the educational system promotes (I think), find themselves in a different place than they expected.
Your experience may be (and likely is) different than mine. But one thing seems clear to me -- innate brilliance is nothing compared to how it is used. How do we teach that?
1. It seems to be pretty much ignored thus far, but the U.S. definitely has state sponsored higher education. I claim this, because pick a state, put "University of" in front of the name, and wham, you have the name of a real university, which probably receives a lot of funding, grants tuition discounts to in-state residents, etc., etc.
2. The tax issue -- let's get this straight. If you have a Ph.D. in the maths and/or sciences area, let's just pull a number out of nowhere. You have a 'right' to command a wage near $75K, say (more or less, depending on the field, but yeah). Now, let's suppose you're Jimmy, the 'average' American citizen. Wait! You only make $45K. Why will you be excited to pay for some kid to go to college so he can make more with your money? That's going to be an exciting bill to pass... Why would you vote for someone who takes that kind of money from you?
3. The prestige factor -- let's suppose we jack up taxes so that anyone who wants to go to a PhD program can afford to. Well, that's a nice sentiment. Then what? The first response is probably that anyone without a PhD gets the shaft, both in finding jobs and in compensation, because now PhDs are a dime a dozen. Since they are a resource in greater supply, demand goes down, as does compensation. Suddenly, the average citizen has extra letters to put to their name, but their standard of living probably doesn't significantly change as a whole.
The wonder and curse of the free market system is that people will pay what a degree is worth for people who have it (compare all those jokes about engineers and liberal arts majors involving asking for wanting fries with that). If there was a huge shortage of qualified PhD holders, having a PhD would be like a ticket to big money, and there would be huge incentive to get them. I don't see that as being the case -- in our society, if you have one, you make more, but not a ton more (in fact, I remember being counseled when graduating with a BS in CS that pursuing an MS or a PhD full time was not cost effective, as you never made up the time * salary in terms of the difference in remuneration went).
If this was really an issue, it would correct itself. What we *should* be concerned about is if big tech companies bring foreign PhDs into the states to do their research, and I don't see that happening much, other than those that are in fact better and brighter than the American counterparts. Free market wins again.
This is presented in a 'there is no choice' light, when really, it should be presented in a 'Microsoft is going to force people to upgrade' light. I believe they could build not x64 based stuff. They choose not to because it benefits them.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but I think blaming misunderstandings about technology for business decisions gets people nowhere.