as for trolls the parent was actually quite informative and for me non-native speaker of english it was an intere4sting read. Still a troll as it should be but a nice one. At least something positive to think about on lazy sat afternoon.
In most of Europe people think that regulations are intended to be there in order to improve people's lives and especially safety.It is so usually but not as frequently as they think.
Here I fixed that for you.
The reality is that even if law makers intentions were good, which are often not, the result is a compromise. This increases side effects and obscures what the real intention was. In a way it is as with a gas under pressure in a bottle - the molecules go each its own way yet the pressure on the walls of the container is constant and has seemingly nothing to do with particle X going its own zigzag trough the mostly empty space.
easy - fine them and as they cannot pay send them to jail.
I suppose that this (I mean passengers w/o money not passengers sent to jail because if it) happen every day. they are fined, asked for account details or credit card or address to which fine is sent or if the going was good at particular day let go free.
You seem to believe that the athletes are innocent and take drugs unwillingly which I find very unlikely. If that were true.they (or their) families would have suied the ass out of the guys that did provide them the drugs yet there are not cases I can hear about where that is true.
I do not like professional sports - this is true. Not because I do not appreciate hard work and skill that results from it but because I am annoyed by amount of money and hypocrisy flowing around it. You say that they have to throw their lives away to participate - yes they do. That is if they want to pursue this line of career then they do. There is not much leeway there.I think the hole premise that sport is healthy is wrong. It is hard work and you pay your price. If you are not ready to do it then do not. I am sorry but that is the way it is. It is good that you mentioned the corporations and work in general. I differ in view on that tho - I think people like me who work for a living, are not (and have no real chance of being) paid obscene loads of money that the top athletes get. From this I draw conclusion that sport is more like entertainment and we all know that hard work in entertainment means you consume drugs and drink loads of alcohol - some survive (Lemmie did so far) some do not (Jimmi H. and many others did not). They produced the flame we all admire but they burnt in it too. It is clear there that this is the case in entertainment industry - it is possibly less clear in sports that it is so. I think is regrettable but professional sport is entertainment industry with all consequences. If one wants to be do sports as amateur then the actual fact of being first is not that important. Like in martial arts or in my preferred example of game of go - the fact that I lost makes me sad but if the game was good I see it as my contribution as well as the person that won. Coming back toy your example - corporations do indeed do such things - vide Apple in China as one example. They are punished for what they do also by customers. Rightly so - Apple employs indirectly slightly more people than tour de France does. As long as drugs enhancing is limited to entertainment I do not care. Work for living as millions of people (have to) do is different.
So bottom line is: you do sports for yourself then you do not take drugs and you do not really care that much whether some suckers do. You do it professionally then you may be obliged to take drugs but you do it consciously. You may have to conceal the fact not to get caught. That is also part o the game. To make another and last analogy. There was a chess game between two masters.One of them used a cigar and walking etc as means of distracting his rival. There was an uproar but I think, not nice as it was, it was allowed. I would not accept that in my private game but they played for the glory and money and the trick was allowed so we have to agree with the result (and change rules if we did not like it).
judging by the way things are, we were so far lucky that no major event removed us and destructive technology we could assemble ourselves was too complicated and at the same time way too harmless for a joe moron to produce and deploy. This is changing thou and it may be that in not so distant future we will have the ability to destroy humanity with the kit you can by for your yearly salary and kept in a cellar. I think this is actually more likely then the mega asteroid but I think it is about time one hits anyway (they come around every 65m and it is about the time is it not?). Not that I care this much. BTW: I see no point of spending my tax money on prevention. After all probability says I will die of cancer or some other organ failure or killed by a car.
I actually do not see a major problem with that. I do not see any benefit of having professional athletes anyway. The olympic ideals are all overdue.The countries that control better do not get medals at Olympic Games. This is as simple as that. If one accepts this as entertainment then all is ok. The only problem is the actual sports fans that do the sports for fun and to get better. Come to think of it this way you can have two venues - ones with sexed up entertainment agents and the other ones where hard work and talent is all that is allowed. I am afraid you would have to still transfer some funds from one to support the controls in another and I guess that is a real problem.
why is it modded -1 - I mean that is true is it not? If somebody believes that top athletes of today do not use any drugs to get there s/he is naive. For some time I believed that the like chess and table tennis would be immune but now I do not and you know what - I do not care. It is just entertainment and if they want to take drugs so be it. I am just sorry for those few sportsmen that actually did not know they consume stuff that is no good. Only to tell which ones are those is difficult if at all possible. Still I guess there are some.
So bottom line is: yes it matters how you run - technique and 'talent' (whatever that is in particular case) but without drugs no success.
well there is a need to watch people and then there is a need for privacy. I can imagine the two being contradictory at first look but then we live in complex societies where a group of jerks can do terrible things if they have enough brains to organize themselves properly. This does not mean we should let the 'feds' do anything they want but we possibly need a method to do it so as to enable them to look for information when need be and at the same time guarantee privacy whenever that is possible. This all can be done in relatively satisfying way as long as the 'feds' do not want to eavesdrop on all of us real time all the time which apparently is what they want. Eventually we will have to find a common ground.
Me thinks.
Now let the shitstorm and wild downmoding start...
It may be that the term metal umlaut is not known to you which is OK. Not everybody has to be fun of Motorhead, Blue Oyster Cult etc or know that these and othe rmetal bands use this freely to express whatever they think they are expressing with this sort of fonts. In case you did not know GP provided a link to an article in wikipedia that explains this quite nicely.
I had a good laugh - not at your post really but thinking about human condition and all the skill needed to perform the job, years to acquire them and these 5 minutes when CEO decides to outsource your job to Zamunda.
The link is interesting in more than one way. I think it is just human to enjoy things that are new but with not too much surprise. Most of us have some preference and these are simple and do not change so to produce a blockbuster you need to follow some set of rules. Granted they do not have to be the same every single time but then bean counters are not known for their adventurous character either. If you look at the other side of the spectrum - films that do experiment, do things that mainstream productions do not do you will see that these movies do not gain as wide audiences at least their box office success is limited because majority of us are just damn simple and expect always the same shit with a slightly changed flavour. The success of 'other' movies, if it comes, is different and usually does not show in box office. Then again the formula, once found, is repeated as long as it holds. It is even not said that you cannot produce interesting products with it from time to time. Majority of this is just production line sort of affair. We know it from elsewhere - even if it is not perfect it is still 'better' also for manager because it is known and follows the rules - if the rules did not bring success then it is not your fault of course....
If you look from different perspective by virtue of limiting a storytelling to say 120minutes of a movie you will naturally have some sort of introduction phase, gaining momentum, reaching the peak and then rolling the credits. There are only few different variations that you can have there. What the article in wiki describes is more complex than that and possibly satisfies majority of our needs so what it means is that there are too many films for them to be all successful. The question is - can you find another nice sequence that hits all the right spots.
To me it looks like Hollywood reached the point of commoditization each and every industry except health is reaching. For some more demanding - there is still hope: vibrators can do better than any men can do but majority of ladies still like an old fashion eco-fck anyway. I guess this will end when the toys will be able to hug etc but for now we still have the chance.
it is only partially true. Social animals develop virtues because that allows them to build complex societies. No virtues = no society. This said there are are always some that abuse the system. Society can survive only if number of such indihviduals is limited - this works by means of social cohesion. In liberal societies this seems to work less efficiently as in ones where not paying your dues means gets you ostracised or worse.
So yes evolution does not give a damn about how irresponsible you are but then we reached extreme levels of population density not because all humans behaved like assholes. You may even theorize about need for having assholes just to prove the system works and keep the defences high - in a sense showing all that are capable of socializing that antisocial types are bad and even evil and some of them may be panished etc.
I disagree slightly with the conclusions of linked article and your later comment but only in 'and bite you in the ass' part because this outcome is not always there.
Societies or social groups evolve and by nature of things you will always have informal as well as formal structures. Whether they are effective and good for people outside the 'elite' is hugely a function not only of this 'elite' but also of other ones (if groups is big enough to have many) as well as what other people i.e. not member of 'elite' say and do. It also depends on what task at hand there is and how fast you have to act. There are situations where informal control group is good for the rest and some where that is not the case. I admit however that the usual outcome is not very efficient and usually it is quite frustrating if working group is prevented from choosing the official leader etc only to fit it into some nice theory. Reminds me of environment I work - still it is not necessarily what is going to happen. As a side note - such working groups as described and discussed here do not exist on their own - there is usually some upper layer that pays the bills and orders the stuff to be done. If they have brains the may chose to prime the structurless brew with some trigger points so that the informal structures form. This is important if you have bigger group of people to be working together. Waiting for informal structures to form themselves or even actively discouraging them is not very productive.
I am afraid the reports about demise of Apple (or whatever is your private enemy) are somewhat premature.
What I find interesting and I see nobody reporting, is how much bunga bunga party cost and what exactly was consumed there per person and night. That is of scientific interest of course - I always wandered how stars and starlets can survive the whole drugs consumption and how come they never contracted some deadly or at least difficult to hide std. Seems like resistance to common std and high tolerance of substance abuse is a must in entertainment, politics and business.
Sometimes these big companies were just so big that they did not notice they were already dead and the cost cutting exercise just brought it to light of the day. Sometimes these companies were just too fat and some cutting is necessary. Sadly there are a lots of examples where companies fell victims of misguided cost control polices that were deployed and it could be seen bonus hunters enjoying their take most of the way (sometimes till the sad end). Usually the healthy companies enjoying bit of luck will come to senses and after bonuses are spent and enjoyed they fix the problem. Sometimes they do not.
I have a fine example: I have seen company refusing purchase of 10 HW pieces worth 500E each i.e. costs of 5kE. Purchase were not essential but would allow us to remove some workarounds, extend test coverage and make our work more efficient in a range I estimate as 2mh per engineer per month. We have say 20 test engineers which makes 40mh per month. Assuming costs of mh (with all the Zamunda testers) set to 50E/h that makes 2kE a month. Project time frame was 10months with second phase at least another half a year and maintenance support for at least 2-3years. Sometimes it is difficult to go to work knowing that corporate policy will not allow you to work efficiently yet you have quarterly sessions about improvements among other things of our cost structure. I do not know how can you respect people forcing you to do all this things. Smaller companies are not immune to the idiocy but at least there the guy who pays indeed does pay for his decisions. IN publicly own companies which I assume we discuss this is not the case and it is really disturbing to watch cost cutting exercise done for the bonus sake only.
This is either funny or terrifying - I am not sure. There was once this fashion in management called down-sizing. I saw a bbc documentary about it (I am sure there was internet at the time but with mozaic as a browser - it was that far back in time) An example of that was Amtrack. I do not remember the details but what they claimed was that the costs reductions succeeded for few years with the result that at some point Amtract started having problems with drivers and locomotives. Sadly the reality of big organisations is that cutting the slack is needed from time to time and usually this does not happen without brutal surgeon that just cuts and cuts and cuts. If patient is relatively healthy and has some luck the lean company can actually be better than before. Some mangers understand the dynamics involved but majority is as may be expected bonus hunters with excel sheet as a main weapon.
well if this misplacing of priorities was all consciously done and pointless then you would be right. For girls and for men - being pretty brings rewards like higher salary and other measures of success. I find it unjust but that is the world we live in. I am also like this: I come to help a nice lady with her luggage much faster than an old crumpy man. So the priorities would not be misplaced even for your. Unless of course we talk about the overdone, shallow and in this quite superficial care of one's own looks.
Killing an attacker to save your ass is betting on luck as polish courts have set sometimes quite big limits of what you can do in self defense. Still this would clarify the situation a bit. Right now it is just she says/he says things possibly leading to life destruction for the guy who I would like to remind/. lynchers - has not been charged. If he is guilty - hang him high but do the due process. Poland is not a savage country where police and courts are unable to do what they are supposed to albeit sometimes they need motivation trough lost cases in human rights tribunal and such. But that is not that different from any other European country.
Ever since I was a kid I missed the old good days of lynch justice. Nothing like a good hanging in the weekend to improve mood of fellow villagers.
This said I can understand all sides: the clerks in a hotel having problems with understanding what an agitated person wants, police with a story that is she/said/he said and no official charge, the alleged victim for letting the steam off and the outraged/.ers. But I also disprove the going at this trough the blog - such things stick to a person and tend to destroy lives (ie lynch justice remark was a sarcasm - I add it as today people have sarcasm sensors off most of the time) . It is in my view an indecent way of getting justice (if in fact attack took place which I do not know). Rape or attempted rape is a serious crime and one should take take it to the police. I am sure US embassy would support her with this. If both are US citizens then I am sure one can press charges on US soil _after_ the facts have been established by local authorities. If she did not get these things done then she should have talked with her lawyer before she blogged about this.
Other than that - hang him higher or put him in tar and use feathers...
Sometimes it is good to read an article really. It does not say that danger comes from AI as we think of it and discuss here. It talks more about side effects of used technology in general. It does not have to be intelligent to be lethal especially if it is powerful enough. Then all this nonsense about using a switch or pulling the plug by nuking the thing - this is assuming you know what is happening and why, you know where the switch is and you have capability to nuke the bloody thing. I think they use gorillas as a analogy - dying out mostly not because they are killed (this happens too) but because they habitat is more and more limited by humans. Thus technology that is limiting us in our abilities maybe considered useful and necessary at some point only to be perceived dangerous when it is too late to switch it off. I do not think they are going to achieve much but society needs also such people. They paying for it themselves so why so much hostility against them here? Each event or new tool can and usually have negative consequences too. The technologies in use today are more and more powerful to the point that they can easily overwhelm us if applied incorrectly. And all this nonsense about people in places without technology - where are such places? The autonomous agents can spread also there. Not today but the way things go soon enough. Even if these non-technological places were to survive IT-world collapse (and this is not the only or even main subject they want to study) the losses elsewhere would have been immense - or do you know how to cultivate your garden to get the food for the winter?
You can of course attempt to justify or negate their need to exist but if I think that US Americans spent in average 2 months a year in front of a TV (you can put any other senseless activity or any other nation here) all the energy spent on that should be highly taxed and can be equally well given to the people discussed in TFA. BTW - the guys involved fund it themselves. At least somebody is spending money on things that are interesting ad inspiring for a change.
Slashdot Mirror
as for trolls the parent was actually quite informative and for me non-native speaker of english it was an intere4sting read. Still a troll as it should be but a nice one. At least something positive to think about on lazy sat afternoon.
Here I fixed that for you.
The reality is that even if law makers intentions were good, which are often not, the result is a compromise. This increases side effects and obscures what the real intention was. In a way it is as with a gas under pressure in a bottle - the molecules go each its own way yet the pressure on the walls of the container is constant and has seemingly nothing to do with particle X going its own zigzag trough the mostly empty space.
I suppose that this (I mean passengers w/o money not passengers sent to jail because if it) happen every day. they are fined, asked for account details or credit card or address to which fine is sent or if the going was good at particular day let go free.
I do not like professional sports - this is true. Not because I do not appreciate hard work and skill that results from it but because I am annoyed by amount of money and hypocrisy flowing around it. You say that they have to throw their lives away to participate - yes they do. That is if they want to pursue this line of career then they do. There is not much leeway there.I think the hole premise that sport is healthy is wrong. It is hard work and you pay your price. If you are not ready to do it then do not. I am sorry but that is the way it is. It is good that you mentioned the corporations and work in general. I differ in view on that tho - I think people like me who work for a living, are not (and have no real chance of being) paid obscene loads of money that the top athletes get. From this I draw conclusion that sport is more like entertainment and we all know that hard work in entertainment means you consume drugs and drink loads of alcohol - some survive (Lemmie did so far) some do not (Jimmi H. and many others did not). They produced the flame we all admire but they burnt in it too. It is clear there that this is the case in entertainment industry - it is possibly less clear in sports that it is so. I think is regrettable but professional sport is entertainment industry with all consequences. If one wants to be do sports as amateur then the actual fact of being first is not that important. Like in martial arts or in my preferred example of game of go - the fact that I lost makes me sad but if the game was good I see it as my contribution as well as the person that won. Coming back toy your example - corporations do indeed do such things - vide Apple in China as one example. They are punished for what they do also by customers. Rightly so - Apple employs indirectly slightly more people than tour de France does. As long as drugs enhancing is limited to entertainment I do not care. Work for living as millions of people (have to) do is different.
So bottom line is: you do sports for yourself then you do not take drugs and you do not really care that much whether some suckers do. You do it professionally then you may be obliged to take drugs but you do it consciously. You may have to conceal the fact not to get caught. That is also part o the game. To make another and last analogy. There was a chess game between two masters.One of them used a cigar and walking etc as means of distracting his rival. There was an uproar but I think, not nice as it was, it was allowed. I would not accept that in my private game but they played for the glory and money and the trick was allowed so we have to agree with the result (and change rules if we did not like it).
judging by the way things are, we were so far lucky that no major event removed us and destructive technology we could assemble ourselves was too complicated and at the same time way too harmless for a joe moron to produce and deploy. This is changing thou and it may be that in not so distant future we will have the ability to destroy humanity with the kit you can by for your yearly salary and kept in a cellar. I think this is actually more likely then the mega asteroid but I think it is about time one hits anyway (they come around every 65m and it is about the time is it not?). Not that I care this much. BTW: I see no point of spending my tax money on prevention. After all probability says I will die of cancer or some other organ failure or killed by a car.
I actually do not see a major problem with that. I do not see any benefit of having professional athletes anyway. The olympic ideals are all overdue.The countries that control better do not get medals at Olympic Games. This is as simple as that. If one accepts this as entertainment then all is ok. The only problem is the actual sports fans that do the sports for fun and to get better. Come to think of it this way you can have two venues - ones with sexed up entertainment agents and the other ones where hard work and talent is all that is allowed. I am afraid you would have to still transfer some funds from one to support the controls in another and I guess that is a real problem.
So bottom line is: yes it matters how you run - technique and 'talent' (whatever that is in particular case) but without drugs no success.
Me thinks.
Now let the shitstorm and wild downmoding start...
It may be that the term metal umlaut is not known to you which is OK. Not everybody has to be fun of Motorhead, Blue Oyster Cult etc or know that these and othe rmetal bands use this freely to express whatever they think they are expressing with this sort of fonts. In case you did not know GP provided a link to an article in wikipedia that explains this quite nicely.
This thing about yaml is odd I admit thou.
I had a good laugh - not at your post really but thinking about human condition and all the skill needed to perform the job, years to acquire them and these 5 minutes when CEO decides to outsource your job to Zamunda.
If you look from different perspective by virtue of limiting a storytelling to say 120minutes of a movie you will naturally have some sort of introduction phase, gaining momentum, reaching the peak and then rolling the credits. There are only few different variations that you can have there. What the article in wiki describes is more complex than that and possibly satisfies majority of our needs so what it means is that there are too many films for them to be all successful. The question is - can you find another nice sequence that hits all the right spots.
To me it looks like Hollywood reached the point of commoditization each and every industry except health is reaching. For some more demanding - there is still hope: vibrators can do better than any men can do but majority of ladies still like an old fashion eco-fck anyway. I guess this will end when the toys will be able to hug etc but for now we still have the chance.
So yes evolution does not give a damn about how irresponsible you are but then we reached extreme levels of population density not because all humans behaved like assholes. You may even theorize about need for having assholes just to prove the system works and keep the defences high - in a sense showing all that are capable of socializing that antisocial types are bad and even evil and some of them may be panished etc.
your algo returns not funny if meme==none and funny in all other cases assuming that assignment in second if gives out true.
Societies or social groups evolve and by nature of things you will always have informal as well as formal structures. Whether they are effective and good for people outside the 'elite' is hugely a function not only of this 'elite' but also of other ones (if groups is big enough to have many) as well as what other people i.e. not member of 'elite' say and do. It also depends on what task at hand there is and how fast you have to act. There are situations where informal control group is good for the rest and some where that is not the case. I admit however that the usual outcome is not very efficient and usually it is quite frustrating if working group is prevented from choosing the official leader etc only to fit it into some nice theory. Reminds me of environment I work - still it is not necessarily what is going to happen. As a side note - such working groups as described and discussed here do not exist on their own - there is usually some upper layer that pays the bills and orders the stuff to be done. If they have brains the may chose to prime the structurless brew with some trigger points so that the informal structures form. This is important if you have bigger group of people to be working together. Waiting for informal structures to form themselves or even actively discouraging them is not very productive.
What you described is a structured society. How then can it be structureless??? OT:if you had no time then maybe you should wait till you do?
What I find interesting and I see nobody reporting, is how much bunga bunga party cost and what exactly was consumed there per person and night. That is of scientific interest of course - I always wandered how stars and starlets can survive the whole drugs consumption and how come they never contracted some deadly or at least difficult to hide std. Seems like resistance to common std and high tolerance of substance abuse is a must in entertainment, politics and business.
I have a fine example: I have seen company refusing purchase of 10 HW pieces worth 500E each i.e. costs of 5kE. Purchase were not essential but would allow us to remove some workarounds, extend test coverage and make our work more efficient in a range I estimate as 2mh per engineer per month. We have say 20 test engineers which makes 40mh per month. Assuming costs of mh (with all the Zamunda testers) set to 50E/h that makes 2kE a month. Project time frame was 10months with second phase at least another half a year and maintenance support for at least 2-3years. Sometimes it is difficult to go to work knowing that corporate policy will not allow you to work efficiently yet you have quarterly sessions about improvements among other things of our cost structure. I do not know how can you respect people forcing you to do all this things. Smaller companies are not immune to the idiocy but at least there the guy who pays indeed does pay for his decisions. IN publicly own companies which I assume we discuss this is not the case and it is really disturbing to watch cost cutting exercise done for the bonus sake only.
you mean (among other things) that vmWare products are not perfect, correct? I am deeply shocked......
This is either funny or terrifying - I am not sure. There was once this fashion in management called down-sizing. I saw a bbc documentary about it (I am sure there was internet at the time but with mozaic as a browser - it was that far back in time) An example of that was Amtrack. I do not remember the details but what they claimed was that the costs reductions succeeded for few years with the result that at some point Amtract started having problems with drivers and locomotives. Sadly the reality of big organisations is that cutting the slack is needed from time to time and usually this does not happen without brutal surgeon that just cuts and cuts and cuts. If patient is relatively healthy and has some luck the lean company can actually be better than before. Some mangers understand the dynamics involved but majority is as may be expected bonus hunters with excel sheet as a main weapon.
well if this misplacing of priorities was all consciously done and pointless then you would be right. For girls and for men - being pretty brings rewards like higher salary and other measures of success. I find it unjust but that is the world we live in. I am also like this: I come to help a nice lady with her luggage much faster than an old crumpy man. So the priorities would not be misplaced even for your. Unless of course we talk about the overdone, shallow and in this quite superficial care of one's own looks.
In Europe it does.
Killing an attacker to save your ass is betting on luck as polish courts have set sometimes quite big limits of what you can do in self defense. Still this would clarify the situation a bit. Right now it is just she says/he says things possibly leading to life destruction for the guy who I would like to remind /. lynchers - has not been charged. If he is guilty - hang him high but do the due process. Poland is not a savage country where police and courts are unable to do what they are supposed to albeit sometimes they need motivation trough lost cases in human rights tribunal and such. But that is not that different from any other European country.
This said I can understand all sides: the clerks in a hotel having problems with understanding what an agitated person wants, police with a story that is she/said/he said and no official charge, the alleged victim for letting the steam off and the outraged /.ers. But I also disprove the going at this trough the blog - such things stick to a person and tend to destroy lives (ie lynch justice remark was a sarcasm - I add it as today people have sarcasm sensors off most of the time) . It is in my view an indecent way of getting justice (if in fact attack took place which I do not know). Rape or attempted rape is a serious crime and one should take take it to the police. I am sure US embassy would support her with this. If both are US citizens then I am sure one can press charges on US soil _after_ the facts have been established by local authorities. If she did not get these things done then she should have talked with her lawyer before she blogged about this.
Other than that - hang him higher or put him in tar and use feathers...
something is wrong with your link - I see no pr0n on this site.
Sometimes it is good to read an article really. It does not say that danger comes from AI as we think of it and discuss here. It talks more about side effects of used technology in general. It does not have to be intelligent to be lethal especially if it is powerful enough. Then all this nonsense about using a switch or pulling the plug by nuking the thing - this is assuming you know what is happening and why, you know where the switch is and you have capability to nuke the bloody thing. I think they use gorillas as a analogy - dying out mostly not because they are killed (this happens too) but because they habitat is more and more limited by humans. Thus technology that is limiting us in our abilities maybe considered useful and necessary at some point only to be perceived dangerous when it is too late to switch it off. I do not think they are going to achieve much but society needs also such people. They paying for it themselves so why so much hostility against them here? Each event or new tool can and usually have negative consequences too. The technologies in use today are more and more powerful to the point that they can easily overwhelm us if applied incorrectly. And all this nonsense about people in places without technology - where are such places? The autonomous agents can spread also there. Not today but the way things go soon enough. Even if these non-technological places were to survive IT-world collapse (and this is not the only or even main subject they want to study) the losses elsewhere would have been immense - or do you know how to cultivate your garden to get the food for the winter?
You can of course attempt to justify or negate their need to exist but if I think that US Americans spent in average 2 months a year in front of a TV (you can put any other senseless activity or any other nation here) all the energy spent on that should be highly taxed and can be equally well given to the people discussed in TFA. BTW - the guys involved fund it themselves. At least somebody is spending money on things that are interesting ad inspiring for a change.