Yet again, the massive lobbying power of the encyclopedia companies is warping American society. When will their corrupt power games end?
But seriously, folks, keeping information from kids is crappy pedagogy. We live in an age of abundance. Unless we start teaching kids how to operate in such an environment and do their own filtering, we'll wind up with a nation of drooling idiots who passively accept whatever is shoveled to them by TV news, political candidates, and their government. Come to think of it, perhaps it's already too late.
So when will institutions learn that times have changed?
The lesson is that there is no longer one Internet. There are multiple internets, filtered to suit the needs of national leaders. They've proven that they can control their own tidy filtered internets. Don't believe me? Just ask Yahoo! about what the French government can do. The irony with the Yahoo! case is that the suit was originally brought not by The Government in France, but by a well-meaning French anti-Nazi group.
Maybe next time we can have a list of all the meaningless lists that keep showing up on Slashdot. These "list" stories are the journalistic equivalent of Twitter: Stimulation without substance.
Matter of fact I think you should go further and say that whenever you do a "best of" all time or century or whatever poll you should exclude the last 5 years or at least give it a mark down ratio to weed out the newness factor.
Speaking of Edward Tufte, check out 'The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching out Corrupts Within' for an excellent critique on the misuse of PowerPoint and a primer on the best way to use this tool.
At the core of Tufte's argument is the notion that PowerPoint (and other slideware) encourages intellectual laziness on the part of the presenter, because it allows a presenter to build a presentation around the software, using it as a crutch. Instead of thinking through complex information and then determining how to augment the oral presentation with selected PowerPoint information, most presenters dumb down the subject matter for PowerPoint. The result is a presentation that has been dumbed-down to suit the needs of the software, not the audience. The presenter is happy, Microsoft is happy, but the audience is not being well-served.
Star Wars was released in 1977. If we're talking about the original Episode IV movie, we're talking about a movie that is 30 years old. Many movies have come and gone since then, and Star Wars still holds up remarkably well. I enjoyed Serenity, but I think its success in this particular popularity contest is primarily based on it being the best scifi movie to appear in recent years.
Take another poll in 2037 and see where the two stack up. I suspect Serenity will hold up well, but I don't know that it will have the broad effect of Star Wars. Despite its faults, Star Wars embraced big themes and grabbed hold of the imagination in a way that few films have.
I am stunned to learn the average American vehicle gets 21mpg, or 8.9 lt/100km.
Here people have decided that the supposed benefits of huge Galaxy-class land vessels are worth paying to refill every couple of days, because not only is there the long-standing male car culture here, but now women are using vehicles as a means of self-actualization, self-aggrandizement, self-empowerment, or whatever you want to call it.
We're perfectly willing to go for instant gratification rather than long-term sanity. Run up your credit cards, buy a Ford Annihilator, and have fun! It's the New American Way. Restraint is for pussies and foreigners.
"In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy."
What do employee/employer relationships at Best Buy have to do with democracy? Nobody has subverted representative government here. One particular corporate entity has made a business decision to cut labor costs by getting rid of some of its more highly-paid employees. There's no violation of contract, no usurpation of rights. There is no right to employment in the United States, and never has been.
It seems to me there are two kinds of "cool." The first arises from genuine interest and shared excitement. I think back to the first time I played with a 512k Mac. I'd never seen a computer like that. It was so new, so different, and so exciting to me that I couldn't help but think it was cool. The first time I ever rode a mountain bike on single-track, I understood why so many people were getting into riding them. Again, cool.
The second kind of cool is generated by vast marketing machines. Sometimes it coincides with genuine cool, but most of the time it does not. No matter how hard the Adolph Coors company tries to convince me that drinking their beer will make me cool and get me bikini-clad chicks (in the snow, no less), I'm not going to buy their swill.
That massive media conglomerates want to grab pre-existing Type 1 Cool when they can't generate it using Type 2 methods is understandable. But ultimately cool has a short shelf life. Most big companies don't know how to create Type 1 Cool on their own, so they resort to Type 2 methods in order to keep the cool they've purchased alive. In such situations, the inevitable result is a stinking heap of uncoolness.
lobby Congress to alter copyright law in the USA to change the duration to something more reasonable
Part of the problem is that the developed nations are in a race to the bottom. Nobody can fix their own laws without running afoul of TRIPS in particular. It looks like the only way to truly reform the IP regime is to do it at the international level.
... it seems like the initiative was poorly drafted:
Van Valkenburg continues to emphasize that Initiative 2 is a mere suggestion to county law enforcement, and doesn't change any laws governing marijuana use.
If the initiative truly is a "mere suggestion," and voters thought it was more than that, put out a new initiative that unequivocally states that the intent is not to advise law enforcement, but to actually change the law. If Van Valkenburg is just an obstinate jackass, and the initiative actually was designed to change the law, it should be relatively easy to enforce the language.
The very idea that, instead of reading, we should be playing some educational game is so ridiculous that I never expected to hear about it in seriousness..
I wasn't being serious. What I meant to imply was that in the popular culture (at least in America) books and reading about serious subjects are often seen as the pastime of snobs and elitists. That misconception is unfortunate indeed.
I don't about you, but I work hard for a living. I can come home and turn on Fox News and get the important issues of the day summarised for me. That's what the information age is all about.
That's where you're wrong. I don't work hard for a living. I'm independently wealthy. That's why I think Americans should pay attention to what's going on around them. I'm just a rich, arrogant snob who reads (and not just when it is forced upon me). I don't believe everything I see on TV, either. One of these days I just know I'll get strung up by an angry mob.
Reading and writing are *so* passe, but if you look at Information Age jobs, these skills are absolutely critical. Beyond jobs, literate citizens are key to a functional democracy. The diminishing of information literacy in America proceeds apace, and our cultural and political life suffers as a result. We expect less and less of ourselves, and we pass that on to the next generation.
Games are great. I grew up playing them, and I still play them. But games aren't a replacement for the tried and true combination of reading, writing, and hard work. Wrapping learning in a sugary coating may make it taste better, but that won't make it nutritional.
Is a "copyrightist" someone who believes that some form of copyright should exist? Or is a "copyrightist" someone who thinks copyright laws should be extended in duration and very strong in enforcement? Perhaps a "copyrightist" is someone who uses copyright enforcement as an excuse to implement invasive monitoring of information flow. Or is a "copyrightist" merely someone who disagrees with your views on copyright law?
I may not know what a "copyrightist" is, but at least thanks to your cogent analysis, at least I know they're all scum. But I wonder, where do these "copyrightists" fit on the Scum Ladder? Are they scummier than Big Oil executives? Scummier than used car dealers? Scummier than rapists? What about spammers? Arey they scummier than spammers?
It is WITH user consent via the 99.9%-unread EULA.
If the EULA enforces things that a reasonable person wouldn't expect to find in a contract of this type, the unreasonable elements of the EULA may be found unenforceable by the courts.
Whether the right to sell data relating to your Internet use to third parties something a reasonable person would expect is debatable. Someone could challenge those portions of the EULA covering click info, on the basis that they are not to be reasonably expected in an end user license covering a contract for Internet access.
The challenge wouldn't necessarily prevail in court, but it could be made. The legal theory behind this is that when one party holds a substantial bargaining advantage over the other, and has employed contractual language that is dense and lengthy, it is unreasonable to expect that the disadvantaged party will be able to spot every element of the contractual language. After all, the company can employ a lawyer to put all sorts of bizarre language into a contract, and most consumers are not schooled in such language, nor do they necessarily have the time to go through the language of each and every EULA. Thus, if the party with an advantage employs tricky language in the EULA, that language can be considered unenforceable.
Still... put your money where your fucking mouth is, Jobs. You've got enough weight to pressure the record companies out of the stone age.
Jobs had a very difficult time even getting the iTunes store off the ground. Since then the labels have pushed back very hard. They've tried to institute differential pricing, which would allow them to charge more for popular songs and *cough* less for unpopular songs. They've kept their margins quite high on iTunes sales. They've thrown considerable money behind a host of iTunes competitors in hopes of wresting control from Apple, and now they are pretending that Apple has foisted DRM on them.
The inmates are definitely running the asylum that is the music industry. They feel Jobs has too much power. They still can't come up with viable business models on their own. They come at every problem from the perspective that their customers are their enemy, and that the one company that has made the authorized download market viable is also their enemy.
If the process was de-politicized something would of probably been done about global worming 10 - 15 years ago
Politics is how people make decisions about issues that have collective effect. I know it's a dirty word in Slashdot, and politicians (ironically) like to talk about "getting beyond politics," but when you have a heterogeneous society with many competing interests, politics is a necessity.
The scientific community is rife with its own politics, and history has shown that unpopular scientific theories and the people who believe them frequently get treated very poorly. Sometimes the dissenters are later vindicated, sometimes they are proven to be on the wrong side of an argument. I think what makes the issue of global warming different from most is that the public is paying very close attention to this debate, unlike many burning conflicts that are only of interest to scientists.
I also disagree that anything would have been done about global warming in the absence of wealthy lobby groups. Americans have always been an optimistic (sometimes ludicrously so) people. We'd rather pay less money for fuel now and have faith that someone will come up with a solution in the 11th Hour. It's our way.
I misread the headline as "Praying for Better Math and Science Teachers," which sadly seemed like it could be an actual headline.
I can see it now: "Education Officials Tell Parents: Pray, and God Will Deliver Math and Science Teachers to Our District!" Thankfully things haven't become that bad yet. Or at least, it's not being reported on just yet.
As with any project, you have to determine the specific requirements before you can even THINK of looking at vendors.
In my experience, the larger the project and the more vested the IT department is in a particular vendor, the less likely your eminently sensible guidelines will be followed.
I truly wish more people with your degree of rationality managed IT departments.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet again, the massive lobbying power of the encyclopedia companies is warping American society. When will their corrupt power games end?
But seriously, folks, keeping information from kids is crappy pedagogy. We live in an age of abundance. Unless we start teaching kids how to operate in such an environment and do their own filtering, we'll wind up with a nation of drooling idiots who passively accept whatever is shoveled to them by TV news, political candidates, and their government. Come to think of it, perhaps it's already too late.
So when will institutions learn that times have changed?
The lesson is that there is no longer one Internet. There are multiple internets, filtered to suit the needs of national leaders. They've proven that they can control their own tidy filtered internets. Don't believe me? Just ask Yahoo! about what the French government can do. The irony with the Yahoo! case is that the suit was originally brought not by The Government in France, but by a well-meaning French anti-Nazi group.
Maybe next time we can have a list of all the meaningless lists that keep showing up on Slashdot. These "list" stories are the journalistic equivalent of Twitter: Stimulation without substance.
Matter of fact I think you should go further and say that whenever you do a "best of" all time or century or whatever poll you should exclude the last 5 years or at least give it a mark down ratio to weed out the newness factor.
Poll-takers everywhere, listen to nuromutt!
Speaking of Edward Tufte, check out 'The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching out Corrupts Within' for an excellent critique on the misuse of PowerPoint and a primer on the best way to use this tool.
At the core of Tufte's argument is the notion that PowerPoint (and other slideware) encourages intellectual laziness on the part of the presenter, because it allows a presenter to build a presentation around the software, using it as a crutch. Instead of thinking through complex information and then determining how to augment the oral presentation with selected PowerPoint information, most presenters dumb down the subject matter for PowerPoint. The result is a presentation that has been dumbed-down to suit the needs of the software, not the audience. The presenter is happy, Microsoft is happy, but the audience is not being well-served.
Star Wars was released in 1977. If we're talking about the original Episode IV movie, we're talking about a movie that is 30 years old. Many movies have come and gone since then, and Star Wars still holds up remarkably well. I enjoyed Serenity, but I think its success in this particular popularity contest is primarily based on it being the best scifi movie to appear in recent years.
Take another poll in 2037 and see where the two stack up. I suspect Serenity will hold up well, but I don't know that it will have the broad effect of Star Wars. Despite its faults, Star Wars embraced big themes and grabbed hold of the imagination in a way that few films have.
I am stunned to learn the average American vehicle gets 21mpg, or 8.9 lt/100km.
Here people have decided that the supposed benefits of huge Galaxy-class land vessels are worth paying to refill every couple of days, because not only is there the long-standing male car culture here, but now women are using vehicles as a means of self-actualization, self-aggrandizement, self-empowerment, or whatever you want to call it.
We're perfectly willing to go for instant gratification rather than long-term sanity. Run up your credit cards, buy a Ford Annihilator, and have fun! It's the New American Way. Restraint is for pussies and foreigners.
So has Cuban shorted Google? ;-)
"In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy."
What do employee/employer relationships at Best Buy have to do with democracy? Nobody has subverted representative government here. One particular corporate entity has made a business decision to cut labor costs by getting rid of some of its more highly-paid employees. There's no violation of contract, no usurpation of rights. There is no right to employment in the United States, and never has been.
It seems to me there are two kinds of "cool." The first arises from genuine interest and shared excitement. I think back to the first time I played with a 512k Mac. I'd never seen a computer like that. It was so new, so different, and so exciting to me that I couldn't help but think it was cool. The first time I ever rode a mountain bike on single-track, I understood why so many people were getting into riding them. Again, cool.
The second kind of cool is generated by vast marketing machines. Sometimes it coincides with genuine cool, but most of the time it does not. No matter how hard the Adolph Coors company tries to convince me that drinking their beer will make me cool and get me bikini-clad chicks (in the snow, no less), I'm not going to buy their swill.
That massive media conglomerates want to grab pre-existing Type 1 Cool when they can't generate it using Type 2 methods is understandable. But ultimately cool has a short shelf life. Most big companies don't know how to create Type 1 Cool on their own, so they resort to Type 2 methods in order to keep the cool they've purchased alive. In such situations, the inevitable result is a stinking heap of uncoolness.
lobby Congress to alter copyright law in the USA to change the duration to something more reasonable
Part of the problem is that the developed nations are in a race to the bottom. Nobody can fix their own laws without running afoul of TRIPS in particular. It looks like the only way to truly reform the IP regime is to do it at the international level.
... it seems like the initiative was poorly drafted:
If the initiative truly is a "mere suggestion," and voters thought it was more than that, put out a new initiative that unequivocally states that the intent is not to advise law enforcement, but to actually change the law. If Van Valkenburg is just an obstinate jackass, and the initiative actually was designed to change the law, it should be relatively easy to enforce the language.
The very idea that, instead of reading, we should be playing some educational game is so ridiculous that I never expected to hear about it in seriousness..
I wasn't being serious. What I meant to imply was that in the popular culture (at least in America) books and reading about serious subjects are often seen as the pastime of snobs and elitists. That misconception is unfortunate indeed.
And pass me the remote, while you're at it.
I literally laughed out loud at that one. Value added, indeed.
I don't about you, but I work hard for a living. I can come home and turn on Fox News and get the important issues of the day summarised for me. That's what the information age is all about.
That's where you're wrong. I don't work hard for a living. I'm independently wealthy. That's why I think Americans should pay attention to what's going on around them. I'm just a rich, arrogant snob who reads (and not just when it is forced upon me). I don't believe everything I see on TV, either. One of these days I just know I'll get strung up by an angry mob.
Now, could someone please pass the Grey Poupon?
Reading and writing are *so* passe, but if you look at Information Age jobs, these skills are absolutely critical. Beyond jobs, literate citizens are key to a functional democracy. The diminishing of information literacy in America proceeds apace, and our cultural and political life suffers as a result. We expect less and less of ourselves, and we pass that on to the next generation.
Games are great. I grew up playing them, and I still play them. But games aren't a replacement for the tried and true combination of reading, writing, and hard work. Wrapping learning in a sugary coating may make it taste better, but that won't make it nutritional.
Is a "copyrightist" someone who believes that some form of copyright should exist? Or is a "copyrightist" someone who thinks copyright laws should be extended in duration and very strong in enforcement? Perhaps a "copyrightist" is someone who uses copyright enforcement as an excuse to implement invasive monitoring of information flow. Or is a "copyrightist" merely someone who disagrees with your views on copyright law?
I may not know what a "copyrightist" is, but at least thanks to your cogent analysis, at least I know they're all scum. But I wonder, where do these "copyrightists" fit on the Scum Ladder? Are they scummier than Big Oil executives? Scummier than used car dealers? Scummier than rapists? What about spammers? Arey they scummier than spammers?
It is WITH user consent via the 99.9%-unread EULA.
If the EULA enforces things that a reasonable person wouldn't expect to find in a contract of this type, the unreasonable elements of the EULA may be found unenforceable by the courts.
Whether the right to sell data relating to your Internet use to third parties something a reasonable person would expect is debatable. Someone could challenge those portions of the EULA covering click info, on the basis that they are not to be reasonably expected in an end user license covering a contract for Internet access.
The challenge wouldn't necessarily prevail in court, but it could be made. The legal theory behind this is that when one party holds a substantial bargaining advantage over the other, and has employed contractual language that is dense and lengthy, it is unreasonable to expect that the disadvantaged party will be able to spot every element of the contractual language. After all, the company can employ a lawyer to put all sorts of bizarre language into a contract, and most consumers are not schooled in such language, nor do they necessarily have the time to go through the language of each and every EULA. Thus, if the party with an advantage employs tricky language in the EULA, that language can be considered unenforceable.
Jocks don't hate you because you suck at sports. Jocks hate you because you're smarter than them.
They're also afraid that their penises are too small. This also explains the correlation between jocks and PCVs (Penis Compensation Vehicles).
Still... put your money where your fucking mouth is, Jobs. You've got enough weight to pressure the record companies out of the stone age.
Jobs had a very difficult time even getting the iTunes store off the ground. Since then the labels have pushed back very hard. They've tried to institute differential pricing, which would allow them to charge more for popular songs and *cough* less for unpopular songs. They've kept their margins quite high on iTunes sales. They've thrown considerable money behind a host of iTunes competitors in hopes of wresting control from Apple, and now they are pretending that Apple has foisted DRM on them.
The inmates are definitely running the asylum that is the music industry. They feel Jobs has too much power. They still can't come up with viable business models on their own. They come at every problem from the perspective that their customers are their enemy, and that the one company that has made the authorized download market viable is also their enemy.
If the process was de-politicized something would of probably been done about global worming 10 - 15 years ago
Politics is how people make decisions about issues that have collective effect. I know it's a dirty word in Slashdot, and politicians (ironically) like to talk about "getting beyond politics," but when you have a heterogeneous society with many competing interests, politics is a necessity.
The scientific community is rife with its own politics, and history has shown that unpopular scientific theories and the people who believe them frequently get treated very poorly. Sometimes the dissenters are later vindicated, sometimes they are proven to be on the wrong side of an argument. I think what makes the issue of global warming different from most is that the public is paying very close attention to this debate, unlike many burning conflicts that are only of interest to scientists.
I also disagree that anything would have been done about global warming in the absence of wealthy lobby groups. Americans have always been an optimistic (sometimes ludicrously so) people. We'd rather pay less money for fuel now and have faith that someone will come up with a solution in the 11th Hour. It's our way.
I misread the headline as "Praying for Better Math and Science Teachers," which sadly seemed like it could be an actual headline.
I can see it now: "Education Officials Tell Parents: Pray, and God Will Deliver Math and Science Teachers to Our District!" Thankfully things haven't become that bad yet. Or at least, it's not being reported on just yet.
As with any project, you have to determine the specific requirements before you can even THINK of looking at vendors.
In my experience, the larger the project and the more vested the IT department is in a particular vendor, the less likely your eminently sensible guidelines will be followed.
I truly wish more people with your degree of rationality managed IT departments.
I am baffled that any of this is a surprise. These guys have always been the AOL of home electronics.
This is the sort of news bitter academics have desired ever since Wikipedia first hit the mainstream.
The well-adjusted ones are fine with Wikipedia, because they understand that it will never replace true academic research.