Keep in mind that you are not defined by your degree. Many positions that want you to have a degree don't care in the slightest what that degree is in.
With that said, to answer your question directly, have you looked at BI? It involves some programming, but also has large nonprogramming aspects to it.
Defect is nothing more and nothing less than something not working as expected. If something is there by a concious decision is a feature; if something is misdoing, it's a defect. It's as simple as that. Really.
I completely agree with you. The point I was trying to make, and perhaps I did not make it as clearly as I could, is that you can have security vulnerabilities that are not defects. Some, obviously are, but to say they all are does not make sense. Security vulnerabilities can arise because of trade offs in the design. When that trade off is permitting a vulnerability to allow more usability, it may very well be a feature.
When that trade off is accepting a vulnerability due to efficiency of the code or to save the time it would take to fix it, then it is clearly a defect, but it can be a defect that is permitted consciously especially when the program is for internal use only and the users can be assumed to be trusted.
But even if that is what you are talking about, that is not what you can get by offering more money.
If someone normally works 40 hours a week, but they can legitimately get more money by meeting certain quality goals, then they will often happily work longer to meet those goals and get the extra money. It provides them the incentive to stay late and come in on weekends and get things done even if it takes longer.
Also, if anything external to the way you work (i.e. the promise of more money) can make you work better, you're slacking off in your daily work: why don't you deliver peak performance without the extra money?
Once again, due to trade offs.
I have had jobs where for several months at a time I worked for 15+ hours a day, every day and that was the minimum some weeks exceeded that substantially. That job got the very best I could give. That was a job where whether people lived or died could be impacted by the quality of my work and the pay was also commensurate with the hours. During that period, I did very little that was not related either to my job or to the physical maintenance of my body. I did not take college classes, did not get certifications, never saw my family in person and spent only a limited amount of time on phone/e-mail keeping in touch with my family. That was my peak performance.
At my current job I work between 45 and 65 hours a week depending on the office tempo and do not at all consider it slacking off (if my boss does, he hasn't said anything). I am not making anywhere close to the pay I was making at the other job, but I see my family, have completed computer certifications, and am preparing to start grad school part time in a month. If a company wants me to give up my time with my family and my ability to pursue personal development, I can certainly be persuaded, but it requires the right motivation. For me to do that again, it would take either a situation where people's lives/health were on the line or a salary high enough to compensate me for what I am giving up, or preferably both.
Sometimes they are. Remember that there are some times when a vulnerability is a technical exploit of something subtle, and those possibilities are always bugs and defects and should be treated as such. But there are many other times when there is a trade off to get that additional security. There is very often a balancing act between usability and security.
This example is certainly not ideal as it does not involve software design, but it is analogous and one that I have personally seen happen. Consider a small company where literally everyone knows everyone and let us say it is a highly technical company so we can assume that everyone knows the basics of what they are doing. They may choose given everyone system administrator priveleges on the database and give everyone a domain admin account even if they normally log in on a lower privileged account. They have absolutely no security in the sense that any user can mess up the system in any way they chose. But they also have none of the usability problems that comes with security. They never have to wait for the network admin to be available if some setting needs to be changed, and never have to worry about a user not being able to get a document they need.
As the company grows, this will become unacceptable. But once security is laid on, now you have to make sure that everyone has the right permissions to read the documents they need. It adds layers of overhead and usability. It increases security, but that security comes at the price of tremendous man hours for a select few domain admins and often forcing users to wait for a designated admin when they need basic things like software installed.
Was the lack of security and the potential vulnerabilities a defect or a design flaw for the small company?
For something more immediately applicable there can also be a trade off between security and efficiency. For instance, I write a lot of SQL scripts that use dynamic SQL. Adding code to protect against SQL Injection requires more of my time to write, more of the computers time to process, and makes the code more complex for someone else who has to maintain it. It comes at a trade off. When I write something that will be used by a broad audience, I always favor security, but when I am writing scripts that will only be used by my internal team I often favor the efficiency and readability.
Clearly, there are cases where a vulnerability is a definite defect, but there are other times when vulnerabilities are consciously accepted for usability, performance, or code maintainability reasons. I will agree that performance and code maintainability become less compelling when it is a commercial product being sold, but they can be major factors within a company where you can often give the user at least a certain minimum level of trust, and usability can be a valid reason to consciously permit small security risks in even a commercial package.
This is a brilliant point. Most of our thought is done well ahead of time, and much of learning (especially in physical activities, but it applies to other things as well) is training ourselves to push things that initially required conscious thought into automatic activities. When I was first learning to drive, I had to think about every time I turned on the turn signal, how often I looked in the rearview mirror, even how much to turn the wheel and I often over corrected. I also didn't think of much of anything else while driving that was directly relevant to driving.
Later, learning to drive a stick shift was the same way. I initially had to pay careful conscious attention to the motor's RPM's, my current speed, my desired speed and such things. After a few weeks, it became automatic and I never gave it any thought at all.
I am in no way an expert on how the mind works, but the way it subjectively seems to be for me is that I no longer have to think about those types of decisions (when to shift gears, when to look in the rearview) because I have trained myself through practice to do them automatically. In a sense, it subjectively feels like I no longer even make those decision at all. But the reason I do not make them is not that I do not have free will and am not capable of making them, rather it is that I have already made them. I decided long ago and trained myself to go along with the decision, that when I am present with a certain set of stimuli I react a certain way. In those cases I no longer have to make the decision.
Suspension of disbelief is ignoring, often only temporarily and for entertainment, the fact you know something to be false. A leap of faith is simply placing more belief in something than the evidence at hand immediately warrants. It is required for all major religions and arguably is required for religion by definition.
It is possible for that leap, though necessary, to come from a solid foundation of thought and evidence. In order to practice a religion you must place more faith in it than the evidence can support, but that is not the same as saying there is no evidence or reasoning behind it. CS Lewis is one of many that does an excellent job laying out a logical case for Christianity and many philosophers and scientist lay out the case for a religion though they are less likely to be specific as to which one. Descartes and Michael Behe provide a couple of examples, and Pascal with his famous "Pascal's Gamble" also provided the topic some thought.
I cannot say that all of their argument are correct, and I myself am quite dubious of some of Behe's reasoning, but the mere existence of their demonstrates that substantial thought and analysis has gone into the question of the correctness of religion by both believers and nonbelievers.
I would point out that many philosophers, theologians, and even scientists have put in tremendous thought regarding the existence of God or lack thereof and continue to believe. I personally am a believer, and I acknowledge that my belief requires a certain leap of faith, but I have put a fair amount of thought into it. I incidentally work as a programmer and hold a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy, and I know many other programmers and mathematicians who also believe in the existence of God in one form or another.
Discarding logic is hardly a prerequisite to logic.
This is certainly true to a degree, but this is the prerequisite for the emergence of the singularity. It is a necessary condition for it, whether it will be a sufficient condition remains to be seen.
Just to clarify this excellent post slightly, the concept of a singularity does not entail AI per se. It requires an intelligence capable of enhancing itself in a recursive fashion, but this could in principle be achieved in a number of ways. Genetic engineering which then permits the development of better genetic engineering, or the direct merging of biological and computer components in a fashion which permits developing better mergers, or in principle taken to the extreme even simply ever better tools for the use in developing technology to make better tools yet.
If a singularity does occur, it will likely emerge from multiple paths at once.
You have a point that someone will always complain and also that there needs to be a level of trust involved, but there are certainly steps that be taken to minimize it. Having a double check will certainly not make the system unhackable, but it can make it harder.
Most free software projects, especially the big ones, have companies that are thrilled to provide support for a fee that is very reasonable compared with the price of the closed-source counterpart. Red hat is one of many prime examples.
It depends on the amount of data to be transferred. I would agree with the parent post either PGP or GPG (a GNU implementation of PGP which is open source and can be made compatible with the right settings) is ideal for a moderately sized chunk of data which does not need to be correct up to the second.
If the amount of data is excessively large or needs to be extremely current then a VPN is a good option.
If you want to get more esoteric, you can set up replication between your database and hers (with or without the benefit of a VPN) and if you want to be paranoid many databases including MS SQL Server 2005/2008 now include native encryption within the database core.
An informal proof is not a proof. However, for most given pieces of code it is possible (and fairly easy) to formally prove that it will halt, it is merely that you can prove that the general case cannot be solved. In other words, for any given piece of code you can probably prove that it will or will not halt, but it is possible to construct code for which it cannot be proven.
You have an awesome point. Another point I would add is that with some exceptions you are not confined to working in your degree field. I work as a DBA and transitioned to that from being a programmer, but my degree is in Math with a minor in philosophy. Computer Science and Math are certainly related fields, but not the same. I learned how to program after leaving college with the help of a lot of books and a couple of good mentors along the way. I've recently been interviewing people for our company and while most of the applicants for programmer slots have CS degrees there are plenty that majored in other loosely related fields. On the flip side, I know people that majored in a hard science and eventually went a pure management route.
The real question is do you have a good reason not to give the customer what they want?
IF you do(concern for performance, concerns about amateurs misinterpreting data, bandwidth since they will have to come in from outside the LAN, concern they will copy everything and then no longer need your company's services...) then express it concisely and it should be no problem. If you have no concern that you can express, then you should probably give it to them.
In fact, it is generally a good rule of them to give the customer what they want if the request is reasonable. So I would go a step further and say that even if you have reasonable concerns, you should look at ways of addressing or mitigating them and proposing those to management too. For instance, if your concern is bringing the server's performance down, perhaps set up replication to another server dedicated to the customer (with the customer providing the money for this additional service and its costs of course). If your concern is misinterpretation, that can be **Partially** mitigated with good documentation, which you probably should have anyway. If the concern is accessing proprietary information, use proper security so they cannot, or to be even more paranoid give them access to only a replicated server which will only have the information they are allowed to have.
Hardly. First, 1984 was about a nanny state, so any nanny state can be easily compared with 1984, it is merely a matter of degree.
Second, within certain limits parents have the right to raise their children as they chose and children can obey their parents well or not. So long as it does not rise to the level of a criminal manner, what right does the state have to interfere (and monitoring is interfering)?
Also, it should be noted that this sounds a lot like the tracking used on certain criminals when on parole/work release/etc. Do we truly want to lump a teenager who skips a couple of classes in with much more serious criminals in this way?
You have a good point, but it is a matter of balancing. Warrants, even so called emergency warrants can take time to obtain and that time can be a crucial factor if someone has been kidnapped, lost in the wilderness, etc.
It is possible (and I presume as a complete non-expert that it is probably current practice) to draw a bright line between information gathered when someone is seen as a potential victim and as a suspect in terms of how that information can be used.
I know personally that should I vanish for an involuntary reason that I would want the authorities to use any and all available resources to include my own records in finding me. Should I for some reason I cannot forsee decide I want to make myself vanish, I would have the foresight to discard the cell phone long before its information was relevant. Allowing the police access to those records prior to a warrant being drawn is definitely a balancing act and I am not saying the police should be given everything carte blanch, but I suspect the number that could be helped by that extra time could be substantial and the number harmed by would be near 0. It is a balance and one we must be careful of going too far down a slippery slope, but in this case I think it is a good trade off.
You describe the dilemma adequately, but you seem to miss two things:
1. Most people want a balance between privacy and safety, but when it comes down to the wire, most will err on the side of safety, especially when the privacy breach is only to parties that are at least theoretically trustworthy such as the police. (The situation changes if released to a PI for instance.)
2. Someone who decides to go off the net deliberately can readily and easily leave their cell phone behind removing much of that concern.
Like many, many jobs out there, help desk is what you make of it. I started at a help desk while I was still in college and now I work as a DBA. If I had relied on the company I was with when I started I would have stayed at the help desk or at best become a manager. Instead, I continued taking college classes while I worked there, pursued promotions, and certifications. What I learned at the help desk and on Tech Support gave me some basic knowledge to help get the certifications and work experience I needed to get the next job, which helped me get the one after that. If you expect your company to train you, you likely won't move up much but if you aggressively seek new opportunities then the help desk can give you the basics and track record you need to move up.
You have an excellent point in that many people will find things that are as worthless as watching a sit com to do, and on the flip side some people might have time watching a sit com be useful. I for instance watch a lot of TV, more than I would care to admit to. But at the same time, most (not all) of that time is spent also doing something such as helping my wife with the dishes or helping her with the laundry or even reading the news. Its certainly not my most productive time, but neither is it completely wasted.
But the point of the article and one I agree with is that if we devote even a small fraction of the time the nation spends just sitting and watching to TV to creating something, we could accomplish a lot. It doesn't mean killing TV any more than the rise of movies killed live performances. It just means spending a little bit less of it on pure TV.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that you are not defined by your degree. Many positions that want you to have a degree don't care in the slightest what that degree is in.
With that said, to answer your question directly, have you looked at BI? It involves some programming, but also has large nonprogramming aspects to it.
Defect is nothing more and nothing less than something not working as expected. If something is there by a concious decision is a feature; if something is misdoing, it's a defect. It's as simple as that. Really.
I completely agree with you. The point I was trying to make, and perhaps I did not make it as clearly as I could, is that you can have security vulnerabilities that are not defects. Some, obviously are, but to say they all are does not make sense. Security vulnerabilities can arise because of trade offs in the design. When that trade off is permitting a vulnerability to allow more usability, it may very well be a feature.
When that trade off is accepting a vulnerability due to efficiency of the code or to save the time it would take to fix it, then it is clearly a defect, but it can be a defect that is permitted consciously especially when the program is for internal use only and the users can be assumed to be trusted.
But even if that is what you are talking about, that is not what you can get by offering more money.
If someone normally works 40 hours a week, but they can legitimately get more money by meeting certain quality goals, then they will often happily work longer to meet those goals and get the extra money. It provides them the incentive to stay late and come in on weekends and get things done even if it takes longer.
Also, if anything external to the way you work (i.e. the promise of more money) can make you work better, you're slacking off in your daily work: why don't you deliver peak performance without the extra money?
Once again, due to trade offs.
I have had jobs where for several months at a time I worked for 15+ hours a day, every day and that was the minimum some weeks exceeded that substantially. That job got the very best I could give. That was a job where whether people lived or died could be impacted by the quality of my work and the pay was also commensurate with the hours. During that period, I did very little that was not related either to my job or to the physical maintenance of my body. I did not take college classes, did not get certifications, never saw my family in person and spent only a limited amount of time on phone/e-mail keeping in touch with my family. That was my peak performance.
At my current job I work between 45 and 65 hours a week depending on the office tempo and do not at all consider it slacking off (if my boss does, he hasn't said anything). I am not making anywhere close to the pay I was making at the other job, but I see my family, have completed computer certifications, and am preparing to start grad school part time in a month. If a company wants me to give up my time with my family and my ability to pursue personal development, I can certainly be persuaded, but it requires the right motivation. For me to do that again, it would take either a situation where people's lives/health were on the line or a salary high enough to compensate me for what I am giving up, or preferably both.
Sometimes they are. Remember that there are some times when a vulnerability is a technical exploit of something subtle, and those possibilities are always bugs and defects and should be treated as such. But there are many other times when there is a trade off to get that additional security. There is very often a balancing act between usability and security.
This example is certainly not ideal as it does not involve software design, but it is analogous and one that I have personally seen happen. Consider a small company where literally everyone knows everyone and let us say it is a highly technical company so we can assume that everyone knows the basics of what they are doing. They may choose given everyone system administrator priveleges on the database and give everyone a domain admin account even if they normally log in on a lower privileged account. They have absolutely no security in the sense that any user can mess up the system in any way they chose. But they also have none of the usability problems that comes with security. They never have to wait for the network admin to be available if some setting needs to be changed, and never have to worry about a user not being able to get a document they need.
As the company grows, this will become unacceptable. But once security is laid on, now you have to make sure that everyone has the right permissions to read the documents they need. It adds layers of overhead and usability. It increases security, but that security comes at the price of tremendous man hours for a select few domain admins and often forcing users to wait for a designated admin when they need basic things like software installed.
Was the lack of security and the potential vulnerabilities a defect or a design flaw for the small company?
For something more immediately applicable there can also be a trade off between security and efficiency. For instance, I write a lot of SQL scripts that use dynamic SQL. Adding code to protect against SQL Injection requires more of my time to write, more of the computers time to process, and makes the code more complex for someone else who has to maintain it. It comes at a trade off. When I write something that will be used by a broad audience, I always favor security, but when I am writing scripts that will only be used by my internal team I often favor the efficiency and readability.
Clearly, there are cases where a vulnerability is a definite defect, but there are other times when vulnerabilities are consciously accepted for usability, performance, or code maintainability reasons. I will agree that performance and code maintainability become less compelling when it is a commercial product being sold, but they can be major factors within a company where you can often give the user at least a certain minimum level of trust, and usability can be a valid reason to consciously permit small security risks in even a commercial package.
This is a brilliant point. Most of our thought is done well ahead of time, and much of learning (especially in physical activities, but it applies to other things as well) is training ourselves to push things that initially required conscious thought into automatic activities. When I was first learning to drive, I had to think about every time I turned on the turn signal, how often I looked in the rearview mirror, even how much to turn the wheel and I often over corrected. I also didn't think of much of anything else while driving that was directly relevant to driving.
Later, learning to drive a stick shift was the same way. I initially had to pay careful conscious attention to the motor's RPM's, my current speed, my desired speed and such things. After a few weeks, it became automatic and I never gave it any thought at all.
I am in no way an expert on how the mind works, but the way it subjectively seems to be for me is that I no longer have to think about those types of decisions (when to shift gears, when to look in the rearview) because I have trained myself through practice to do them automatically. In a sense, it subjectively feels like I no longer even make those decision at all. But the reason I do not make them is not that I do not have free will and am not capable of making them, rather it is that I have already made them. I decided long ago and trained myself to go along with the decision, that when I am present with a certain set of stimuli I react a certain way. In those cases I no longer have to make the decision.
That was one of the best physics book for a popular audience ever.
Suspension of disbelief is ignoring, often only temporarily and for entertainment, the fact you know something to be false. A leap of faith is simply placing more belief in something than the evidence at hand immediately warrants. It is required for all major religions and arguably is required for religion by definition.
It is possible for that leap, though necessary, to come from a solid foundation of thought and evidence. In order to practice a religion you must place more faith in it than the evidence can support, but that is not the same as saying there is no evidence or reasoning behind it. CS Lewis is one of many that does an excellent job laying out a logical case for Christianity and many philosophers and scientist lay out the case for a religion though they are less likely to be specific as to which one. Descartes and Michael Behe provide a couple of examples, and Pascal with his famous "Pascal's Gamble" also provided the topic some thought.
I cannot say that all of their argument are correct, and I myself am quite dubious of some of Behe's reasoning, but the mere existence of their demonstrates that substantial thought and analysis has gone into the question of the correctness of religion by both believers and nonbelievers.
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/ has an excellent write up of why this is not possible in the way it should work according to the description.
I would point out that many philosophers, theologians, and even scientists have put in tremendous thought regarding the existence of God or lack thereof and continue to believe. I personally am a believer, and I acknowledge that my belief requires a certain leap of faith, but I have put a fair amount of thought into it. I incidentally work as a programmer and hold a degree in mathematics with a minor in philosophy, and I know many other programmers and mathematicians who also believe in the existence of God in one form or another.
Discarding logic is hardly a prerequisite to logic.
This is certainly true to a degree, but this is the prerequisite for the emergence of the singularity. It is a necessary condition for it, whether it will be a sufficient condition remains to be seen.
Just to clarify this excellent post slightly, the concept of a singularity does not entail AI per se. It requires an intelligence capable of enhancing itself in a recursive fashion, but this could in principle be achieved in a number of ways. Genetic engineering which then permits the development of better genetic engineering, or the direct merging of biological and computer components in a fashion which permits developing better mergers, or in principle taken to the extreme even simply ever better tools for the use in developing technology to make better tools yet.
If a singularity does occur, it will likely emerge from multiple paths at once.
You have a point that someone will always complain and also that there needs to be a level of trust involved, but there are certainly steps that be taken to minimize it. Having a double check will certainly not make the system unhackable, but it can make it harder.
The server the article is sitting on seems a little overwhelmed. Is there a mirror somewhere?
Most free software projects, especially the big ones, have companies that are thrilled to provide support for a fee that is very reasonable compared with the price of the closed-source counterpart. Red hat is one of many prime examples.
It depends on the amount of data to be transferred. I would agree with the parent post either PGP or GPG (a GNU implementation of PGP which is open source and can be made compatible with the right settings) is ideal for a moderately sized chunk of data which does not need to be correct up to the second.
If the amount of data is excessively large or needs to be extremely current then a VPN is a good option.
If you want to get more esoteric, you can set up replication between your database and hers (with or without the benefit of a VPN) and if you want to be paranoid many databases including MS SQL Server 2005/2008 now include native encryption within the database core.
Heh. I was tempted to buy one just for the fact it was open source, until I saw the price tag.
An informal proof is not a proof. However, for most given pieces of code it is possible (and fairly easy) to formally prove that it will halt, it is merely that you can prove that the general case cannot be solved. In other words, for any given piece of code you can probably prove that it will or will not halt, but it is possible to construct code for which it cannot be proven.
You have an awesome point. Another point I would add is that with some exceptions you are not confined to working in your degree field. I work as a DBA and transitioned to that from being a programmer, but my degree is in Math with a minor in philosophy. Computer Science and Math are certainly related fields, but not the same. I learned how to program after leaving college with the help of a lot of books and a couple of good mentors along the way. I've recently been interviewing people for our company and while most of the applicants for programmer slots have CS degrees there are plenty that majored in other loosely related fields. On the flip side, I know people that majored in a hard science and eventually went a pure management route.
The real question is do you have a good reason not to give the customer what they want?
IF you do(concern for performance, concerns about amateurs misinterpreting data, bandwidth since they will have to come in from outside the LAN, concern they will copy everything and then no longer need your company's services...) then express it concisely and it should be no problem. If you have no concern that you can express, then you should probably give it to them.
In fact, it is generally a good rule of them to give the customer what they want if the request is reasonable. So I would go a step further and say that even if you have reasonable concerns, you should look at ways of addressing or mitigating them and proposing those to management too. For instance, if your concern is bringing the server's performance down, perhaps set up replication to another server dedicated to the customer (with the customer providing the money for this additional service and its costs of course). If your concern is misinterpretation, that can be **Partially** mitigated with good documentation, which you probably should have anyway. If the concern is accessing proprietary information, use proper security so they cannot, or to be even more paranoid give them access to only a replicated server which will only have the information they are allowed to have.
Hardly. First, 1984 was about a nanny state, so any nanny state can be easily compared with 1984, it is merely a matter of degree.
Second, within certain limits parents have the right to raise their children as they chose and children can obey their parents well or not. So long as it does not rise to the level of a criminal manner, what right does the state have to interfere (and monitoring is interfering)?
Also, it should be noted that this sounds a lot like the tracking used on certain criminals when on parole/work release/etc. Do we truly want to lump a teenager who skips a couple of classes in with much more serious criminals in this way?
You have a good point, but it is a matter of balancing. Warrants, even so called emergency warrants can take time to obtain and that time can be a crucial factor if someone has been kidnapped, lost in the wilderness, etc. It is possible (and I presume as a complete non-expert that it is probably current practice) to draw a bright line between information gathered when someone is seen as a potential victim and as a suspect in terms of how that information can be used. I know personally that should I vanish for an involuntary reason that I would want the authorities to use any and all available resources to include my own records in finding me. Should I for some reason I cannot forsee decide I want to make myself vanish, I would have the foresight to discard the cell phone long before its information was relevant. Allowing the police access to those records prior to a warrant being drawn is definitely a balancing act and I am not saying the police should be given everything carte blanch, but I suspect the number that could be helped by that extra time could be substantial and the number harmed by would be near 0. It is a balance and one we must be careful of going too far down a slippery slope, but in this case I think it is a good trade off.
You describe the dilemma adequately, but you seem to miss two things: 1. Most people want a balance between privacy and safety, but when it comes down to the wire, most will err on the side of safety, especially when the privacy breach is only to parties that are at least theoretically trustworthy such as the police. (The situation changes if released to a PI for instance.) 2. Someone who decides to go off the net deliberately can readily and easily leave their cell phone behind removing much of that concern.
Like many, many jobs out there, help desk is what you make of it. I started at a help desk while I was still in college and now I work as a DBA. If I had relied on the company I was with when I started I would have stayed at the help desk or at best become a manager. Instead, I continued taking college classes while I worked there, pursued promotions, and certifications. What I learned at the help desk and on Tech Support gave me some basic knowledge to help get the certifications and work experience I needed to get the next job, which helped me get the one after that. If you expect your company to train you, you likely won't move up much but if you aggressively seek new opportunities then the help desk can give you the basics and track record you need to move up.
You have an excellent point in that many people will find things that are as worthless as watching a sit com to do, and on the flip side some people might have time watching a sit com be useful. I for instance watch a lot of TV, more than I would care to admit to. But at the same time, most (not all) of that time is spent also doing something such as helping my wife with the dishes or helping her with the laundry or even reading the news. Its certainly not my most productive time, but neither is it completely wasted. But the point of the article and one I agree with is that if we devote even a small fraction of the time the nation spends just sitting and watching to TV to creating something, we could accomplish a lot. It doesn't mean killing TV any more than the rise of movies killed live performances. It just means spending a little bit less of it on pure TV.