Your entire attitude is called "bending over for the corporation".
We get Enron from shit like that.
I'm not one for bending over for the corporation, but you're completely wrong on Enron. Enron worshipped individualism and ego, and the ability to torpedo other employees' work was considered a sign of talent. The flimsiest snow jobs were accepted in lieu of real work. People were promoted based on their belief in their own superiority. You would have loved it.
Exactly. The only part that had any credibility was where he trashed on consultants, and he only said the same thing people have *always* been saying about consultants, at least for as long as I've been in software. Bullying and manipulation? Bread and butter for people managing low-paid nerds, common knowledge for years. He had nothing original to say and felt it was worth humiliating himself to say it. Classy.
I didn't not think he wasn't, but then again, it's been awhile since I haven't not completely failed to ignore the race, and his campaign hasn't exactly been the least unsuccessful at not being not covered in the media.
You're right. I hadn't considered the possibility that his working set might be much bigger than 8 GB. Any time you can fit an appreciable amount of the working set into memory, but not all of it, it's a big win to add memory. It doesn't help to add memory when the working set already fits or when physical memory is very small compared to the working set. But, I still think we can give the original poster a little bit of credit and assume that he wouldn't be sweating gigabytes while working on a terabyte problem.
You must be new around here (humanity), because that's just what we do.
I think you're the one who's new around here, if you think people don't behave irrationally, or that there are still people who believe otherwise. The only people who believe human beings are rational are certain economists, and they only believe it for a highly technical definition of "rational."
Personal computers do not have support for more than 8 GB for a good reason, there isn't I/O capacity to use that much memory.
Sure there is, if you're using all 8GB over and over in an unpredictable pattern. You can't optimize memory access unless you can predict it. That means insight into the problem and insight into the data, combined with intelligent reorganization of the data, either in preprocessing or at run-time.
Given the information we have, as far as I can see you can only argue against needing more than 8GB by arguing that 1) it's implausible that his problem might be resistant to such optimizations, and 2) it's implausible that buying 16GB of RAM is a better solution than doing the R&D to discover and implement the optimizations.
Is your working set honestly over 8GB? Your dataset might be extremely large... but I would think that for the most part you'd get along just fine with swapping out to a decently fast device and your working set would be considerably below 8GB.
...
more L1/L2 cache available to access. Though this assumes your applications are somewhat parallelizable...
That's a big assumption. Give the guy a break! Maybe he's just working on a problem where there's no known way to achieve predictable data access patterns. After all, not everyone doing math on computers is solving differential equations. When somebody says their working set is over 8GB and you make the jump all the way down to L1 and L2 cache, it's obvious that you are used to working on nicely behaved numerical problems. Not everybody is so lucky! And, indeed, a lot of heavy work goes into making those problems so "nice." Differential equations have been the center of the applied math world for over two hundred years, and they have important military and industrial applications. Centuries of brilliant mathematical work, massive investment, decades of clever programming, and all this for problems that naturally lend themselves to partitioning and parallelization anyway. The field is so mature that people who work on these kinds of problems get used to the idea that arbitrarily large datasets can be processed in arbitrarily small chunks just by using common sense and known techniques. In general, this assumption is much too optimistic. There are plenty of problems that are not so nice or not so well understood.
Even one page of the little yellow copy of Der Process I bought as a student, which is the smallest form factor I consider sane, has about three times as much text area as FBReader on my n800.
Okay, I just checked and discovered that a page of my Reclam edition of Der Process has only about twice the area as FBReader on my n800, not three times like I said. That book's form factor seems to be my lower limit for relaxed reading. Anything smaller either doesn't have enough on a page (constant flipping or scrolling) or is so small I have to hold it closer to my face than a regular book.
No karma blown, they've never tried one so therefore ebooks/readers must suck.
You're right; it's illogical. However, there is method behind the madness. I haven't, and wouldn't, come right out and say, "I've never seen an e-book, and I think they suck," but I'll venture an apology for those who do. I've been hearing people proclaim that displays are good enough to replace books, newspapers, etc. for twenty years. Not just futurists or marketers, but real people who actually used the technology. That's two-thirds of my life, so you can't blame me for being cynical by this point. E-book proponents suffer from being preceded by decades of enthusiasts who eagerly and prematurely embraced whatever technology was currently available as the successor to print.
In fact, as the technology has become better and better, the predictions of the death of print have been toned down considerably. People made ridiculous claims about the supremacy of 80-column text on monochrome CRTs that no one would dare make about the Kindle today. I repeat, these were not (all) futurists, marketers, attention whores like Dvorak, or semi-literate basement gnomes, but real, educated professionals who had to spend a considerable amount of time in front of those CRTs. So, people who have never seen an e-book and feel safe disregarding all positive reports are just adopting a strategy with a proven track record. It's cheaper to assume e-books are useless, because you'll probably be right for years and years and save yourself tons of time and expense checking out new products, and then one day you'll be wrong, and you won't lose much over it. Unless you're Amazon, which is why they're going to be on the cutting edge the whole way, just to make sure they don't miss the turning point.
By the way, I do have a Nokia n800, and I'm pretty sure it does suck:-) Aside from the size and weight, and the fact that it doesn't require any elbow room to operate, I find it far inferior to paper and even inferior to a regular old laptop. For the case of reading a newspaper, I find that I scan articles much quicker with a physical paper, and when I decide to actually read an article, I'm a better reader when using a physical paper because I often skip back and reread sections when reading a long article. The n800 is so small and slow that I do that much less. The longer the text, the worse it gets. I take my n800 with me when I'm not carrying my laptop, and when I get stranded in a coffee shop with nothing to read, I tend to buy a newspaper or grab a free paper rather than check out my news sites on the n800. Using FBReader, I was never able to get enough text on the screen using a readable font. (Well, of course not -- otherwise books that size would be very popular. Everybody loves the idea when they seen those itsy-bitsy books, then they buy a few and quickly sour on them. Even one page of the little yellow copy of Der Process I bought as a student, which is the smallest form factor I consider sane, has about three times as much text area as FBReader on my n800.) Honestly, if you used a similar device as a primary reading technology for a whole summer and didn't end up with a frothing hatred for it, then I think we'd probably feel very differently about the Kindle, too.
More and more cores? Consumer desktops and laptops have gone up to a whopping two cores -- four cores only if you blow a wad of dough for bragging rights. Two processors is definitely not overkill for the average user, especially since most users have a browser full of Ajax-ridden web pages open 24/7. I doubt that four cores will be overkill, either, once we start to realize all the various ways we've crippled applications to make them well-behaved citizens of the vanishing single-core desktop.
The massively multicore processors are exactly where they need to be: in servers and workstations, and on the desks of hardware queens who absorb the cost of product development so I don't have to.
poorer performance on the vast majority of apps and games which people were running in isolation
People run the vast majority of their applications concurrently with other applications. The only significant exception is gamers. When you're dealing with a sluggish app on a single-core machine, what are the odds it's unresponsive because of another application vs. being unresponsive because of its own problems? Now, same question, on a dual-core machine? The odds drop quite a bit. It's nice to have a spare core so when one app gets fussy the rest of your applications keep responding normally.
it doesn't seem like applications or operating systems have seen a major overhaul since that time (just incremental gains)
All the more reason to have multiple cores. In my experience, having multiple processors actually compensates for application-level and OS-level multiprocessing deficiencies, because let's face it, one hoggish app can make it very annoying to use a single-core machine. OSes are supposed to mitigate that, but since they don't do a perfect job, multiple cores help keep the system usable. Granted, there are other resources besides CPU that can suffer from contention, but every little bit helps.
As a car enthusiast, you probably perform more maintenance on your vehicles than the regular user is apt to.
Ditto this. Any use of the word "reliable" without clarification, especially coming from a self-proclaimed enthusiast, means nothing. I'm an avowed car non-enthusiast, and I can't tell you how much it mystifies me when I hear, "This is a real reliable car; it's almost six years old, and it hasn't really had any work yet, just had to replace the BZ adjuster coil [warning: I'm making these terms up because I know jack shit about cars], probably just a bad part, and last year I thought I would have to replace the entire transmission but it turned out to be just a worn A-flange, the mechanic found a perfectly good one in the junkyard and only charged me labor. Then there was the time..." and on and on. Maybe when you're fascinated by how your car works it's so much fun to get your car fixed that you just don't feel the cost and inconvenience as keenly as other people do. Or maybe some people take it for granted that a car needs constant adjustment and fixing, and that every car owner should be conversant in automotive repair terminology, and when it turns out to only cost $400 to fix you should be grateful.
Me, I think a "reliable" car should make it past 150,000 miles on scheduled maintenance and a few minor repairs. I'd love it if ten years from now I can drop the "few minor repairs" clause from my standard or up the mileage to 250k. I get no geeky pleasure from chattering about automotive repair.
Rebranding the program was easier than I expected, although I have to admit I had no idea how easy until he explained it. He just downloaded a few point-and-click tools off the internet: one to replace images in the Windows resource file, one to locate and edit hard-coded strings in the binary, and one to create the installer. (I suppose replacing null-terminated strings is pretty easy if you replace each string with a shorter string. It might be harder to hack a.NET program -- you'd probably need to disassemble the compiled classes, edit them, and recompile them.)
His "solution" to this seems to be to close the source for parts of the program, which is a major overreaction to this joker.
It's possible to rebrand a program without having the source. Six years ago I used a commercial modeling front-end to prepare a demo of a research project my company was doing. I hacked our back-end code, which was a middleware product that as yet had no GUI (and no apparent need for one) to emit data that the front end used to display pretty pictures showing our product in action.
Then someone realized that the pretty pictures actually had some business value in their own right. My boss immediately replaced all the branding in the commercial modeling tool with our logo and redid the About... page to make it look like we developed it. He did this by hacking the binary installed version of the product and generating a new installer for it. No source code required.
His excuse was, "If the demo gets us a deal, we'll call the front-end company and negotiate with them to rebrand the product." Right. That makes it okay, then.
When you're in these places, you're in public. You're not in the privacy of your own home or anything like that. You're on public streets. By going out into public you've already given up a certain amount of anonymity de facto.
That makes perfect sense in the world of twenty years ago and the world we still mostly inhabit, but pervasive electronic surveillance threatens to change the meaning of statements like these. If you want to maintain the same rhetoric, make sure the words mean the same thing -- i.e., stop surveillance from de facto changing what it means to be in a public place versus a private place.
If you accept that "public place" means "a place where a detailed, permanent record of every action is captured and archived by the government," then you should rethink whether we want to have any "public places" at all. By that definition, perhaps only congressional chambers, courtrooms, jail cells, and the immediate vicinity of police officers should be public places.
Their methodology wasn't odd, it just employs tactics that the typical geek wouldn't think of. Investigating current environmental practices and impacts, i.e., the engineering approach, could stir up a little PR tempest for companies to handle. Would companies respond by improving their environmental standards? Most likely it would be cheaper to act contrite, make a few token reforms and empty promises of more to come, and then sit back and wait for the next little tempest.
Greenpeace wants to force corporations to make specific promises about their environmental practices. This would make corporations vulnerable to much stronger pressure: Nintendo would suffer much greater damage if accused of outright lying to the public and lying to consumers. It doesn't mean much to most people when Greenpeace says a company isn't green enough, but most people take offense at being lied to. Plus, if a company promises to meet a certain environmental standard, people assume that the standard must be quite reasonable, probably the minimal morally decent standard. Nintendo would look very shoddy if they endorsed a standard and then failed to live up to it.
Compare this with the effects of an occasional expose, and it's easy to see that Greenpeace isn't just being lazy. They're trying to change corporate behavior in a way that has a lasting impact. And, perhaps more importantly, they're speaking in a language that corporations can understand and respect. Taking the corporate viewpoint for a second, doesn't it sound reasonable to formulate corporate standards, pledge to adhere to them, and expect to be held accountable? Doesn't that sound better than random ad-hoc drive-by shrieking denunciations (which is how executives perceive anything that references a reality external to law, shareholder demands, corporate memos, market research, etc.)?
Why, being held to one's own corporate standards is the second-best thing to not being accountable at all;-) I'm surprised you attempt to invoke Greenpeace's radical reputation at a moment when they're taking an approach that shows a great deal of understanding of, and understanding for, the way modern corporations work.
On the other hand, in some places the primary virtue of public school is that it insulates children from their parents and community:-)
Optional schooling or privatized schooling -- either one -- would limit the vast majority of lower-class kids, and a very large number of middle-class kids, to the class they were born into. They would be limited by the attitudes and understanding of their parents and the people they look up to. Perhaps by some theory they could be said to deserve that fate, but even from selfish point of view, our economic fate is tied to their future economic productivity. I think far more is gained by rescuing talented kids from those classes than is destroyed by marginally limiting the development of kids with savvy parents.
The problem is with the word "intelligence." Does intelligence mean only a talent for reasoning with symbols and understanding abstract patterns? Or does intelligence mean the ability to do the appropriate thing in a given situation? Some researchers pursuing the former meaning claim to have found a kind of "intelligence" that doesn't seem to be very malleable over the long term. Obviously it is very difficult to measure, and the research is plagued by the same kinds of limitations that plague every kind of social science research. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this kind of intelligence is a very poor predictor of success at things commonly regarded as requiring intelligence: achievement in difficult non-physical professions; achievement of external goals such as financial and relational security; successful navigation and manipulation of social, political, and economic systems; and intellectual accomplishment. There are so many factors involved in achievement, even in intellectual achievements such as writing a well-regarded novel or creating a new scientific theory, that the purely abstract and purely non-malleable "intelligence" (if it exists) is just one weak predictor out of many. People working from the second definition of intelligence obviously have no use for such a limited form of intelligence. They can plausibly claim that it has no obvious application to real problems, other than being a trendy new excuse for being a selfish bastard. On the other hand, their definition of intelligence has problems, too: they inevitably lump every human characteristic tending to success under the label "intelligence." Their intelligence ends up being an incoherent pile of useful abilities: emotional intelligence, kinematic intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, social intelligence, and so on.
Obviously there is potential for mischief in conflating the two definitions. The first kind of intelligence is abstract, impersonal, unmalleable, and quite possibly genetic. The second kind of intelligence is an all-encompassing measure of human potential. Try combining those two. Oops. "Potential for mischief" is an understatement. Pretty much everybody who uses the topic of intelligence to sell books and articles or build their moral authority is promoting this confusion or fighting against it -- usually the former while claiming the latter. It's a powerful justification for American conservatives and a wonderful, cherished bogeyman for American leftists.
(Sidebar: This is exactly what conservatives and leftists do with other concepts that are used to describe and understand differences between people, such as biological race. Conservatives want the public to embrace their naive intuition about race; leftists want them to reject it. Therefore, conservatives look for narrower concepts of race that might be coherent and scientifically defensible. It doesn't matter how trivial or inconsequential the theory is; what's important is that its respectability encourages people to accept much broader notions of race. Leftists seek to expand biological race concepts so they are easier to debunk and ridicule. This makes people distrust their own ideas about race. Both sides are knee-deep in intellectual dishonesty.)
Back to the confusion between the two types of intelligence (and of course the myriads of alternatives and variations that I've excluded): The confusion not only makes for sickening political battles, it also absolutely precludes useful casual conversation about intelligence. You can't talk about intelligence without being so careful and precise that for most people it seems more like work than like conversation. (I include myself in that group. The only reason I can bear to write all this out is that I've had to do it before in another context.) Presumably, that's why the poster originating this branch of the discussion did not bother explaining that he simply disagreed with his parent's definition of intelligence, and why you didn't bother explaining your definition of intel
If you mean their raison d'etre is to make kids unmotivated, I think you hit the nail on the head.
The school system isolates smart kids from any meaningful feedback except test scores, and it accustoms them to the constant drumbeat of, "Wow! You're great!" Eventually, they start to panic and feel like failures whenever they don't hear it.
The not-as-smart kids who are just interested in having a decent job and a decent life are unmotivated because they feel completely cut off from the real world. They all have, or start with, a strong desire to work to improve their own lives, but they're told to do schoolwork, and there is no credible person available to explain why schoolwork is relevant to the real world. Teachers can't convince kids they know anything about "the real world." (Teaching does share substantial "real world" aspects with other professions, but those common aspects are paperwork and bureaucracy. It's best not to mention paperwork and bureaucracy when attempting to motivate teenagers.)
In all cases, kids end up feeling trapped in the system and inhibited from working to further their own interests.
The intellectually oriented kids are best off. They understand that doing coursework prepares them in some measure for their future work. Obviously it isn't ideal, but it isn't completely worthless, either. (If you thought it was completely worthless, well, you weren't smart -- at least not about that particular question.) The not-so-intellectual kids have good opportunities in school to work to their own future benefit, and are repeatedly told so, but they don't really believe it. And you can't blame them. There's no practical way for kids to verify the value of the work. They have to rely entirely on the credibility of their teachers, who have little credibility to tell any kids (except aspiring teachers) that schoolwork has any relevance to their future. Every ounce of skepticism felt by students translates into lower morale, less effort, less achievement, and more frustration.
The solution? Make education an attractive profession. Double the salaries; recognize and reward talent; make sure teachers get more payback for their hard work than an occasional picture in the local newspaper. Teachers must be successful professionals, not just idealists or old-fashioned wives or people who just wanted lots of time off and didn't care what they were paid. Education has to provide opportunities for smart, competent, materially ambitious people. Otherwise you end up with only idealists on the one hand and underachievers on the other. Students respond to idealists but fundamentally don't identify with them; they tend to regard them as out-of-touch with the real world. As for the underachievers, well, who can feel good about taking advice from them and *shudder* following in their footsteps? No, kids need to be taught by people they can optimistically identify with. For the vast majority of kids, that means bright, hardworking, materially ambitious people, people who currently regard education as a shabby backwater.
Ever hear of SUVs and how their profits propped up the moribund American car industry for half a decade? Ever hear about Ford or GM agonizing over the off-road performance of their Envoys and Expeditions?
The biggest reason this chip left the lab is to be a flashy status symbol for rich gamers and to manipulate brand perceptions.
Guess I don't need to be asking what the bogomips are.
Coincidentally, I was wondering if it was fast enough to finish the infinite loops that Firefox kicks off in/with/involving X.
(Yeah, yeah, I know it's *really* the Firefox add-ons or the naughty websites I go to... porn sites aren't a fair test of stability because they're shameful, and Firefox is a delicate flower that wilts in the presence of immorality, or poorly-written plugins. I'm just drunkly bashing my favorite browser. I abuse her because that's how much I love her, goddammit!)
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Exactly. The only part that had any credibility was where he trashed on consultants, and he only said the same thing people have *always* been saying about consultants, at least for as long as I've been in software. Bullying and manipulation? Bread and butter for people managing low-paid nerds, common knowledge for years. He had nothing original to say and felt it was worth humiliating himself to say it. Classy.
Make sure you include some runtime checking, because you never know what might get loaded and linked.
I didn't not think he wasn't, but then again, it's been awhile since I haven't not completely failed to ignore the race, and his campaign hasn't exactly been the least unsuccessful at not being not covered in the media.
You're right. I hadn't considered the possibility that his working set might be much bigger than 8 GB. Any time you can fit an appreciable amount of the working set into memory, but not all of it, it's a big win to add memory. It doesn't help to add memory when the working set already fits or when physical memory is very small compared to the working set. But, I still think we can give the original poster a little bit of credit and assume that he wouldn't be sweating gigabytes while working on a terabyte problem.
Given the information we have, as far as I can see you can only argue against needing more than 8GB by arguing that 1) it's implausible that his problem might be resistant to such optimizations, and 2) it's implausible that buying 16GB of RAM is a better solution than doing the R&D to discover and implement the optimizations.
Okay, I just checked and discovered that a page of my Reclam edition of Der Process has only about twice the area as FBReader on my n800, not three times like I said. That book's form factor seems to be my lower limit for relaxed reading. Anything smaller either doesn't have enough on a page (constant flipping or scrolling) or is so small I have to hold it closer to my face than a regular book.
You're right; it's illogical. However, there is method behind the madness. I haven't, and wouldn't, come right out and say, "I've never seen an e-book, and I think they suck," but I'll venture an apology for those who do. I've been hearing people proclaim that displays are good enough to replace books, newspapers, etc. for twenty years. Not just futurists or marketers, but real people who actually used the technology. That's two-thirds of my life, so you can't blame me for being cynical by this point. E-book proponents suffer from being preceded by decades of enthusiasts who eagerly and prematurely embraced whatever technology was currently available as the successor to print.
In fact, as the technology has become better and better, the predictions of the death of print have been toned down considerably. People made ridiculous claims about the supremacy of 80-column text on monochrome CRTs that no one would dare make about the Kindle today. I repeat, these were not (all) futurists, marketers, attention whores like Dvorak, or semi-literate basement gnomes, but real, educated professionals who had to spend a considerable amount of time in front of those CRTs. So, people who have never seen an e-book and feel safe disregarding all positive reports are just adopting a strategy with a proven track record. It's cheaper to assume e-books are useless, because you'll probably be right for years and years and save yourself tons of time and expense checking out new products, and then one day you'll be wrong, and you won't lose much over it. Unless you're Amazon, which is why they're going to be on the cutting edge the whole way, just to make sure they don't miss the turning point.
By the way, I do have a Nokia n800, and I'm pretty sure it does suck
The massively multicore processors are exactly where they need to be: in servers and workstations, and on the desks of hardware queens who absorb the cost of product development so I don't have to.
People run the vast majority of their applications concurrently with other applications. The only significant exception is gamers. When you're dealing with a sluggish app on a single-core machine, what are the odds it's unresponsive because of another application vs. being unresponsive because of its own problems? Now, same question, on a dual-core machine? The odds drop quite a bit. It's nice to have a spare core so when one app gets fussy the rest of your applications keep responding normally.
All the more reason to have multiple cores. In my experience, having multiple processors actually compensates for application-level and OS-level multiprocessing deficiencies, because let's face it, one hoggish app can make it very annoying to use a single-core machine. OSes are supposed to mitigate that, but since they don't do a perfect job, multiple cores help keep the system usable. Granted, there are other resources besides CPU that can suffer from contention, but every little bit helps.
Ditto this. Any use of the word "reliable" without clarification, especially coming from a self-proclaimed enthusiast, means nothing. I'm an avowed car non-enthusiast, and I can't tell you how much it mystifies me when I hear, "This is a real reliable car; it's almost six years old, and it hasn't really had any work yet, just had to replace the BZ adjuster coil [warning: I'm making these terms up because I know jack shit about cars], probably just a bad part, and last year I thought I would have to replace the entire transmission but it turned out to be just a worn A-flange, the mechanic found a perfectly good one in the junkyard and only charged me labor. Then there was the time..." and on and on. Maybe when you're fascinated by how your car works it's so much fun to get your car fixed that you just don't feel the cost and inconvenience as keenly as other people do. Or maybe some people take it for granted that a car needs constant adjustment and fixing, and that every car owner should be conversant in automotive repair terminology, and when it turns out to only cost $400 to fix you should be grateful.
Me, I think a "reliable" car should make it past 150,000 miles on scheduled maintenance and a few minor repairs. I'd love it if ten years from now I can drop the "few minor repairs" clause from my standard or up the mileage to 250k. I get no geeky pleasure from chattering about automotive repair.
Rebranding the program was easier than I expected, although I have to admit I had no idea how easy until he explained it. He just downloaded a few point-and-click tools off the internet: one to replace images in the Windows resource file, one to locate and edit hard-coded strings in the binary, and one to create the installer. (I suppose replacing null-terminated strings is pretty easy if you replace each string with a shorter string. It might be harder to hack a .NET program -- you'd probably need to disassemble the compiled classes, edit them, and recompile them.)
It's possible to rebrand a program without having the source. Six years ago I used a commercial modeling front-end to prepare a demo of a research project my company was doing. I hacked our back-end code, which was a middleware product that as yet had no GUI (and no apparent need for one) to emit data that the front end used to display pretty pictures showing our product in action.
Then someone realized that the pretty pictures actually had some business value in their own right. My boss immediately replaced all the branding in the commercial modeling tool with our logo and redid the About... page to make it look like we developed it. He did this by hacking the binary installed version of the product and generating a new installer for it. No source code required.
His excuse was, "If the demo gets us a deal, we'll call the front-end company and negotiate with them to rebrand the product." Right. That makes it okay, then.
Let me guess: your day job is writing copy for porn sites. :-)
That makes perfect sense in the world of twenty years ago and the world we still mostly inhabit, but pervasive electronic surveillance threatens to change the meaning of statements like these. If you want to maintain the same rhetoric, make sure the words mean the same thing -- i.e., stop surveillance from de facto changing what it means to be in a public place versus a private place.
If you accept that "public place" means "a place where a detailed, permanent record of every action is captured and archived by the government," then you should rethink whether we want to have any "public places" at all. By that definition, perhaps only congressional chambers, courtrooms, jail cells, and the immediate vicinity of police officers should be public places.
Hey, this isn't the right place to argue about things like that. Take it to Wikipedia.
Their methodology wasn't odd, it just employs tactics that the typical geek wouldn't think of. Investigating current environmental practices and impacts, i.e., the engineering approach, could stir up a little PR tempest for companies to handle. Would companies respond by improving their environmental standards? Most likely it would be cheaper to act contrite, make a few token reforms and empty promises of more to come, and then sit back and wait for the next little tempest.
;-) I'm surprised you attempt to invoke Greenpeace's radical reputation at a moment when they're taking an approach that shows a great deal of understanding of, and understanding for, the way modern corporations work.
Greenpeace wants to force corporations to make specific promises about their environmental practices. This would make corporations vulnerable to much stronger pressure: Nintendo would suffer much greater damage if accused of outright lying to the public and lying to consumers. It doesn't mean much to most people when Greenpeace says a company isn't green enough, but most people take offense at being lied to. Plus, if a company promises to meet a certain environmental standard, people assume that the standard must be quite reasonable, probably the minimal morally decent standard. Nintendo would look very shoddy if they endorsed a standard and then failed to live up to it.
Compare this with the effects of an occasional expose, and it's easy to see that Greenpeace isn't just being lazy. They're trying to change corporate behavior in a way that has a lasting impact. And, perhaps more importantly, they're speaking in a language that corporations can understand and respect. Taking the corporate viewpoint for a second, doesn't it sound reasonable to formulate corporate standards, pledge to adhere to them, and expect to be held accountable? Doesn't that sound better than random ad-hoc drive-by shrieking denunciations (which is how executives perceive anything that references a reality external to law, shareholder demands, corporate memos, market research, etc.)?
Why, being held to one's own corporate standards is the second-best thing to not being accountable at all
On the other hand, in some places the primary virtue of public school is that it insulates children from their parents and community :-)
Optional schooling or privatized schooling -- either one -- would limit the vast majority of lower-class kids, and a very large number of middle-class kids, to the class they were born into. They would be limited by the attitudes and understanding of their parents and the people they look up to. Perhaps by some theory they could be said to deserve that fate, but even from selfish point of view, our economic fate is tied to their future economic productivity. I think far more is gained by rescuing talented kids from those classes than is destroyed by marginally limiting the development of kids with savvy parents.
The problem is with the word "intelligence." Does intelligence mean only a talent for reasoning with symbols and understanding abstract patterns? Or does intelligence mean the ability to do the appropriate thing in a given situation? Some researchers pursuing the former meaning claim to have found a kind of "intelligence" that doesn't seem to be very malleable over the long term. Obviously it is very difficult to measure, and the research is plagued by the same kinds of limitations that plague every kind of social science research. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this kind of intelligence is a very poor predictor of success at things commonly regarded as requiring intelligence: achievement in difficult non-physical professions; achievement of external goals such as financial and relational security; successful navigation and manipulation of social, political, and economic systems; and intellectual accomplishment. There are so many factors involved in achievement, even in intellectual achievements such as writing a well-regarded novel or creating a new scientific theory, that the purely abstract and purely non-malleable "intelligence" (if it exists) is just one weak predictor out of many. People working from the second definition of intelligence obviously have no use for such a limited form of intelligence. They can plausibly claim that it has no obvious application to real problems, other than being a trendy new excuse for being a selfish bastard. On the other hand, their definition of intelligence has problems, too: they inevitably lump every human characteristic tending to success under the label "intelligence." Their intelligence ends up being an incoherent pile of useful abilities: emotional intelligence, kinematic intelligence, aesthetic intelligence, social intelligence, and so on.
Obviously there is potential for mischief in conflating the two definitions. The first kind of intelligence is abstract, impersonal, unmalleable, and quite possibly genetic. The second kind of intelligence is an all-encompassing measure of human potential. Try combining those two. Oops. "Potential for mischief" is an understatement. Pretty much everybody who uses the topic of intelligence to sell books and articles or build their moral authority is promoting this confusion or fighting against it -- usually the former while claiming the latter. It's a powerful justification for American conservatives and a wonderful, cherished bogeyman for American leftists.
(Sidebar: This is exactly what conservatives and leftists do with other concepts that are used to describe and understand differences between people, such as biological race. Conservatives want the public to embrace their naive intuition about race; leftists want them to reject it. Therefore, conservatives look for narrower concepts of race that might be coherent and scientifically defensible. It doesn't matter how trivial or inconsequential the theory is; what's important is that its respectability encourages people to accept much broader notions of race. Leftists seek to expand biological race concepts so they are easier to debunk and ridicule. This makes people distrust their own ideas about race. Both sides are knee-deep in intellectual dishonesty.)
Back to the confusion between the two types of intelligence (and of course the myriads of alternatives and variations that I've excluded): The confusion not only makes for sickening political battles, it also absolutely precludes useful casual conversation about intelligence. You can't talk about intelligence without being so careful and precise that for most people it seems more like work than like conversation. (I include myself in that group. The only reason I can bear to write all this out is that I've had to do it before in another context.) Presumably, that's why the poster originating this branch of the discussion did not bother explaining that he simply disagreed with his parent's definition of intelligence, and why you didn't bother explaining your definition of intel
Character!
If you mean their raison d'etre is to make kids unmotivated, I think you hit the nail on the head.
The school system isolates smart kids from any meaningful feedback except test scores, and it accustoms them to the constant drumbeat of, "Wow! You're great!" Eventually, they start to panic and feel like failures whenever they don't hear it.
The not-as-smart kids who are just interested in having a decent job and a decent life are unmotivated because they feel completely cut off from the real world. They all have, or start with, a strong desire to work to improve their own lives, but they're told to do schoolwork, and there is no credible person available to explain why schoolwork is relevant to the real world. Teachers can't convince kids they know anything about "the real world." (Teaching does share substantial "real world" aspects with other professions, but those common aspects are paperwork and bureaucracy. It's best not to mention paperwork and bureaucracy when attempting to motivate teenagers.)
In all cases, kids end up feeling trapped in the system and inhibited from working to further their own interests.
The intellectually oriented kids are best off. They understand that doing coursework prepares them in some measure for their future work. Obviously it isn't ideal, but it isn't completely worthless, either. (If you thought it was completely worthless, well, you weren't smart -- at least not about that particular question.) The not-so-intellectual kids have good opportunities in school to work to their own future benefit, and are repeatedly told so, but they don't really believe it. And you can't blame them. There's no practical way for kids to verify the value of the work. They have to rely entirely on the credibility of their teachers, who have little credibility to tell any kids (except aspiring teachers) that schoolwork has any relevance to their future. Every ounce of skepticism felt by students translates into lower morale, less effort, less achievement, and more frustration.
The solution? Make education an attractive profession. Double the salaries; recognize and reward talent; make sure teachers get more payback for their hard work than an occasional picture in the local newspaper. Teachers must be successful professionals, not just idealists or old-fashioned wives or people who just wanted lots of time off and didn't care what they were paid. Education has to provide opportunities for smart, competent, materially ambitious people. Otherwise you end up with only idealists on the one hand and underachievers on the other. Students respond to idealists but fundamentally don't identify with them; they tend to regard them as out-of-touch with the real world. As for the underachievers, well, who can feel good about taking advice from them and *shudder* following in their footsteps? No, kids need to be taught by people they can optimistically identify with. For the vast majority of kids, that means bright, hardworking, materially ambitious people, people who currently regard education as a shabby backwater.
Ever hear of SUVs and how their profits propped up the moribund American car industry for half a decade? Ever hear about Ford or GM agonizing over the off-road performance of their Envoys and Expeditions?
The biggest reason this chip left the lab is to be a flashy status symbol for rich gamers and to manipulate brand perceptions.
(Yeah, yeah, I know it's *really* the Firefox add-ons or the naughty websites I go to... porn sites aren't a fair test of stability because they're shameful, and Firefox is a delicate flower that wilts in the presence of immorality, or poorly-written plugins. I'm just drunkly bashing my favorite browser. I abuse her because that's how much I love her, goddammit!)