You can go to jail for spitting out your gum on the sidewalk in Singapore. (Mind you, unlike the wireless nonsense, I'm not sure that isn't an idea we should all emulate.)
Spammers sure impair the functioning of my computer. As do pop-ups, ads that take eons to load, stupid registration requirements, and all the rest of the Golgafrinchan bullshit. So this law means we can get rid of all that, right? Right?
It's a pattern of practice with Microsoft and plenty of other megacorps: if you can't buy favorable legislation or regulatory treatment, you draw out the legal case long enough to make the results useless in the real world. Microsoft initially just bought anyone who was a threat. It was when they tried to get a lock on the then-new web that the revolt finally started. That first time, Microsoft told the courts to go do anatomically impossible unnatural acts on themselves. There was a judgment against them, a shell-shocked looking Bill Gates, and then the tactics changed. Ever since, they've just made sure that court cases take longer than the approx. 5 year life span of software, and they're home free.
Unfortunately, we need a lot more than Antitrust 2.0--although that's essential too to get real competition back into software. We need a Legal System 2.0, one that can provide due process fast enough to do some good.
Score one for the humans. Fijians had the longest history of documented cannibalism of any society on earth. (They're completely over it now. Incredibly friendly people. Honest.) And the Fijian name for humans who were on the menu was "long pig."
B. C. (Before Computers) there were lists in many big cities of people willing to share their floor space with passing hippies, backpackers, and whatnot. It sure made traveling cheaper and easier when it was around, and you met the greatest people. Worked beautifully for a while, but then I guess the whatnots got too numerous, and the whole thing kind of melted away. It gives me a warm fuzzy to see open source traveling being rebooted.
The guy is so far off the mark, I didn't even bother going to the original sources. I'm a biologist, university prof, etc, etc, not a climate scientist, etc. etc. Since global warming affects biological systems so much, I'm reasonably familiar with the arguments.
Just a sampling of the nonsense. 1) Hockey stick graph. There was dispute about the first one that he mentions. Some people carped about how if you worked really hard at waving your arms and squinting at the data, you could doubt it. It has since been confirmed. It is so nailed down at this point that he had to refer to the old hockey stick graph, not the current one that goes even further through the roof.
2) Fluctuations in heat from the sun can account for global warming. Think about this. We get fluctuations in insolation every year. It's called summer and winter. The places that heat up the most are the ones that get the most sun, like the tropics, or the places in the summer season. The hallmark of human-caused global warming is night time warming, polar warming, and high altitude warming. In other words, it's not that hot places get hotter, it's that cold places get hotter. You'll notice that the polar ice is shrinking, the Canadian Northwest passage is becoming navigable, the permafrost of the boreal tundras is melting, the glaciers are disappearing, and so on. The BS about solar warming was debunked years ago.
The rest of his points are equally silly. For all of us who are not climate scientists, note that the consensus about global warming among people who actually are climate scientists is up there around 98%. Scientists would rather argue than eat. (Weigh scientists. You'll notice much less of an obesity problem than in the population at large.) They don't come to a consensus unless the evidence is overwhelming. They don't come to a 98% consensus unless there's no point arguing at all. The reason one can find 2% dissenters is that some people will say anything to justify either their paychecks or their preconceived notions. The fact that it's only 2% actually speaks pretty well for scientists, as a group, although 0% would be better.
The big difference between passports and what Homeland "Security" has been doing, is that passports are issued and have worked with relatively few messes. Homeland Security's no-fly lists even had Ted Kennnedy on them, the Senator from Massachusetts. Whatever you may think of Ted, the likelihood that he's a front man for Ansar al-Islam is nil. They've got dead people on their list, including one of the 9/11 hijackers. They've got toddlers. And nobody seems to be able to get off their damn list. So I can just see it: Homeland Security misspells your name once, you spend the rest of your life filling out forms.
I use Kubuntu, so your menu may be a bit different. Approximately, then: Start -> System -> Adept Manager. That's the next iteration up of apt-get, or something, I believe. Anyway, it's a GUI way of installing programs, it makes sure you have all the other stuff the program you want depends on, and it puts the installed program somewhere on the Start menu for you. You may have to hunt around, but it's usually pretty logical. When you click on it and it first opens (after asking for your sudo pswd), you get an absolutely immense alphabetical list of every damn thing on your machine. First thing to do is to "fetch updates." Then scroll down to where your desired program might be, eg Firefox. Click on the left-caret-shaped thingy at the very left, and more details drop down. The button at bottom left says "Request Install" or "Request Upgrade". Hit that, hit "Apply changes" in the menu bar at the top of the window, and you're all set. You can select as many upgrades or installs as you want, and then hit apply changes to do the whole lot at once. Hope this works for you!
I started trying to use Linux in the late 90s, and at that point I couldn't even get the monitor resolution working. Linux has come a very long way since then. Ubuntu is 95% of the way there. But hardware compatibility is indeed the big problem. (Well, that, and fonts. All those damn proprietary fonts that you have to figure out how to install yourself or else all your transferred files look like crap.)
1) Printers. Everybody uses printers. Everybody. What does Linux have? CUPS. It's a great printing system. It's put together and maintained by real altruists. Don't get me wrong. But the user interface is HOPELESS. There's a priceless description of the problems, much better than I could say it myself. Gutenprint is a huge addition / improvement to CUPS. When the GUI frontends work (eg foomatic), they help, but the browser-based GUI isn't really in the ballpark. To begin with, a Windows user would never guess how to get at it. It's not like you can go to Start-System-Printers, and a little note pops up saying "type localhost:631 in the address bar in your browser." I know that many of the hardware problems are due to uncooperative manufacturers not providing data for drivers, but John and Jane Q. Public don't care. They have their own problems.
2) Networking. Almost everybody has home networks. In the good old days, say seven years ago, networking was a nightmare on all systems. Windows users are now used to everything just finding everything and not arguing. Wireless and wired. Linux users have the added problem of having to network across OSs. But however the problem gets solved, a solution is not optional. Turning on your computer and having to fight with networking is a kiss of death for Linux.
Speaking of uncooperative manufacturers, that's not something that any amount of change in Linux can solve. It seems to me that that's a regulatory issue. It's a fundamentally anti-competitive practice, and anti-monopoly laws ought to apply. It wouldn't be fair to require manufacturers to make sure their equipment works with everyone else's, but neither should they be able to prevent others from getting it to work. They should be required to provide the necessary information, which is a government function, not a Linux one.
It wasn't a nightmare, but it's not painless either. The upgrade itself went effortlessly. I followed their instructions for upgrading on the download page, and downloading all the new files took about four hours, but there were no problems with the process. It also updated to Firefox 2.0, the new OpenOffice, and so on as part of it. Settings were saved. So far, so good.
The biggest problem for me was that it lost the wireless connection. Judging by the forums, a lot of people had that problem. lsmod shows that my Broadcomm wireless is loaded, but Edgy doesn't even know it's there. One of the reasons I'm so calm about it is that I didn't do the upgrade on my main computer. The problem would be affecting me a whole lot more if it was interfering with my daily work.
To be fair, I think we need to remember that the Ubuntu folks promise near-perfection on their whole number versions. This is 6.1 Obviously, I and everyone else would prefer perfection right the way along, but upgrading to interim versions is a trade-off between having the latest and helping the debugging process.
The examples they mention are nothing. You have to gown up to work in the pathogen lab, which is inconvenient and annoying, but otherwise there's nothing to it. Dealing with stool samples, likewise. By the time the pathogist gets it, the sample is in buffer and doesn't even smell. (Well, not much.) No, the dirtiest job I've seen in science is extracting fossils from the tar goo at the La Brea tar pits. The fossil work is in digs below ground level. The tar pits are exactly that. It's not just some cute marketing name. Tar fumes are heavier than air. So the idealistic scientists are down there in what amounts to a huge bucket of tar, getting covered in black goo, and breathing chokingly horrible carcinogenic fumes. That's what I call a dirty job.
Security theater, indeed. Searching Granny's jogging shoes has always struck me that way. Not being able to take a bottle of water on board is equally idiotic. But it's all maximally inconvenient and we notice the hell out of it and it's supposed to feel like Somebody is Doing Something.
The sad thing is Soghoian could have pointed the facts out in fifteen scholarly papers, and the government would have blown him off. But when he figures out a way of succinctly getting the real message across, then that's a crime.
Now, I like Ed Markey. I think he's one of our best Congressmen. But on this issue, he seems to have lost his marbles. The security hole is the crime. Not pointing it out.
The BBC article makes for good reading the same way a National Enquirer piece about bat boys does, but other than that: forget it. Evolutionary biology is what I taught at universities for decades, and my first thought on reading that was: this is going to require the invention of a new gene for male choosiness. Then there's going to have to be plenty of selective pressure to strengthen it. In other words, men who are choosy about who they'll have sex with have more reproductive success than the other kind. Biologists define reproductive success as having offspring that themselves reach reproductive age.
Obviously, once people were separated into trolls and Greek gods, the two species wouldn't have a thing to say to each other. But to reach that point, very small differences have to be enough to stop people from having sex. Even women don't seem to be choosy enough to prevent plenty of genetic mixing everywhere on the planet.
I don't know about you, but I think we'll be having faster than light travel long before people swear off sex with everyone who doesn't make the grade. What do you think?
Much as I think TV is suitable only for folks with water on the brain, it's important to remember that a statistical correlation (which is what this is) does not mean that TV causes autism, or that autism causes TV. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which autistic children simply watch more TV because one of the main symptoms of the disorder is difficulty interacting with others. That said, it is a fascinating bit of data, and one that means we better find out what staring at TVs _does_ cause (if anything) before there's nobody left with a normal brain to do it.
One reason why animation that doesn't use an actor's work may persist is that it won't run into the licensing fees, or whatever they'll be calling them in the brave new world. I'm sure in-demand actors will charge suitably exorbitant rates for the use of their emoting skills. Or, more likely, their names.
Not in over 30 years on campuses, which takes me back past the dawn of the internet age. Not at Harvard, not at state schools (Hawaii, Florida, Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico), nor at smaller private schools. I have heard of bandwidth being restricted to computers in dorm rooms, to cut down on bandwidth overload due to MMGs and downloads, but never the whole campus. And never specific sites, as far as I remember. Just overall bandwidth limits. I think I may have heard of hardcore porn sites being blocked, but I'm not sure. (Then again, maybe I'm just oblivious. It wouldn't be the first time.) I would think that if you can't get at given sites even from supervised terminals in the library, then there's a Supreme Court-level academic freedom issue.
The loss of quality is not immediate, or theoretically unavoidable, but the fewer moderators there are, the greater the effect of any individual one. Given that most of us aren't professionals at debating or philosophy, our moderating is likely to be average, and likelier to be poor quality than outstanding. With few moderators, it seems statistically inevitable that over time quality of the comments will deteriorate. (The problem is similar to choosing rulers via monarchy with its tiny sample size of one family, versus democracy with its huge sample size of hundreds or thousands of people with enough education, free time, money, etc.)
Pessimistic message: There's no way for small blogs or forums to guarantee good moderation, unless they find the Holy Grail of leadership: how to consistently find and appoint the most competent people to any given position. Anyone with the answer to that will probably be in line for the Nobel prize.
However, even if perfection can't be guaranteed, maybe something could be done by increasing the randomness of how moderators are selected. That seems counterintuitive, since it feels like what's needed is a _bigger_ effort to select the best. But the track records of efforts to improve selection are dismal. The value of large sample sizes is that randomness is more easily achieved. So maybe what's needed in small groups is a bigger effort NOT to select the best, but instead to improve the randomness with which moderators are selected. Might be worth a try.
First: I don't think it's up to the information pipes to help us catch criminals. I think they should say no to everybody. But there's an asymmetry here. Google participates in reducing freedom of speech in China (even if it's not quite as far down the slope on that as Yahoo). But when it's a matter of catching pedophiles, then suddenly their principles are inviolable?
Sorry. I wasn't clear. My point was that Apple did not coin the term, not when the iPod was introduced. To do some more quoting of Wiki: The term was originally coined by Ben Hammersley in an article in the Guardian on February 12, 2004, meant as a contraction of "broadcasting" and "iPod". Further down: The concept of podcasting was suggested as early as 2000 and its technical components were available by 2001, then implemented in the program Radio Userland. In 2001, the iPod was under development.
There are the folks who say "pod" was adopted from "portable on demand" but I'm sure it's one of those acronyms where the word it spells, in this case something small with neat stuff inside, is really the important part. The fact that Apple latched onto that word is smart marketing. But I don't see the value for anyone, except Apple and other corporations who've lawyered up, in allowing them to own words not coined by them and that are also simply part of the language. They can trademark "iPod". They did coin that, and it does name a unique product. But letting them get away with monopolizing every "pod" out there is just plain silly. At this rate they'll have to go back in time and sue the folks who made the movie about "pod people."
Actually, no. The iPod name came after the word podcasting was already floating around. The iPod is indeed the reason podcast became a household term, but Apple did not invent the usage. (Look the words up in Wikipedia, for a short history.)
Apple didn't come up with this word, so what the hell are they playing at? The whole thing reminds me of that Dilbert cartoon, where Dogbert is called to the rescue when Microsoft wants to patent the ones and the zeroes. Apple needs to remember that customers make money for a company, not lawyers. Lawyers take money.
Admittedly, I'm kind of a geeky one. When I heard about Microsoft's plans to have Windows phoning home about the validity of the software I was using, I decided Win98 would be my last MS OS. That was around 2000, when they came up with the bright idea of allowing people to use the Office suite only so many times before registering. They dropped that after a while, but as far as I was concerned, it was too late to apologize.
Linux, back then, wasn't written for people like me. I'm not terrified of the command line, but I do spend most of my time doing something besides futzing with computer innards (such as biology, writing, graphics). It is impossible, for me anyway, to remember the exact syntax of a command after a couple of months. So I was always having to look stuff up, go over old ground, get it wrong, fight with it some more, and get frustrated. It didn't help that on forums, the commonest answers to questions were variants of RTFM (which I'd done, dammit) or something like "dmesg has all that information," without any hint as to what dmesg was, how to get at it, or what to look for.
Redhat 6 was the first workable Linux distro for me. Ubuntu is a whole order of magnitude better yet. And the other really big deal about Ubuntu that's going to make a difference is the polite, helpful and welcoming tone of their forums. Believe me, legions of n00bs freak out at linux forums. Mark Shuttleworth is onto something there.
At this point, I think if Windows users, not just Win98, could see just how low the learning curve us for Ubuntu, the somewhat-geeks would switch in droves. (For the total nongeek, linux isn't there yet, mainly because of driver issues, which I know are not linux's fault.) Maybe what we need is a "spread open source" movement modelled on "spread firefox."
Let's see. MS was anti-competitive with Windows 3.0, Win2000, WinME, WinXp, and now--I'm shocked, shocked!--with Vista. And the Europeans expected exactly what? Why don't the governments just switch over to Linux? Ubuntu for instance. They could help everyone by getting usability kinks worked out, write any specialized software they need (which they probably have to do now anyway), and just generally Get Over It. Guess who'll be at a competitive disadvantage then.
There are two issues: 1) do you protect bad students from themselves? 2) when and how to post video of lectures?
The first point is a difficult issue. Bad students aren't usually stupid, but they do tend to have bad judgment. So there's a real tendency to think, "Oh, hell. There's two whole months to go. I'll listen to this shit later." Then they never get around to it, wind up with a D or whatever, and feel very let down because the teacher didn't teach them right. This may sound stupid, but there is a valid point. It's a rare person who doesn't need some handholding at some point in their lives to get over rough spots of bad judgment. So how do you encourage them to listen regularly? What I'd try is: post to a password-protected area, hand out the password for the week in class, and allow the video itself to be saved only by streaming the whole thing. The videos would then be taken down after a couple of weeks. Obviously, if somebody really wants to just get the saved version from a fellow student, there's nothing you can do about that. People do have to be willing to be helped.
The second point is much easier. I agree with the person who said audio-only wouldn't work in the sciences. Or the arts, for that matter. Visuals often include copyrighted material that can't be (legally) broadcast, which is another reason to post to a password-protected area. Keeps the publishers' legal beagles off you, because you are allowed to show the materials to your class. That's kind of the whole point. When to post would depend on the organization of the class, but certainly not too many days after the lecture, or it would get horribly confusing.
That was the realistic take for now. Ideally, eventually, the whole video or audio stream of the class, in its best incarnation, would be posted to open courseware, like MIT and Wikipedia have in the works, and anybody, anywhere, could benefit from the effort put into it.
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You can go to jail for spitting out your gum on the sidewalk in Singapore. (Mind you, unlike the wireless nonsense, I'm not sure that isn't an idea we should all emulate.)
Spammers sure impair the functioning of my computer. As do pop-ups, ads that take eons to load, stupid registration requirements, and all the rest of the Golgafrinchan bullshit. So this law means we can get rid of all that, right? Right?
It's a pattern of practice with Microsoft and plenty of other megacorps: if you can't buy favorable legislation or regulatory treatment, you draw out the legal case long enough to make the results useless in the real world. Microsoft initially just bought anyone who was a threat. It was when they tried to get a lock on the then-new web that the revolt finally started. That first time, Microsoft told the courts to go do anatomically impossible unnatural acts on themselves. There was a judgment against them, a shell-shocked looking Bill Gates, and then the tactics changed. Ever since, they've just made sure that court cases take longer than the approx. 5 year life span of software, and they're home free.
Unfortunately, we need a lot more than Antitrust 2.0--although that's essential too to get real competition back into software. We need a Legal System 2.0, one that can provide due process fast enough to do some good.
Score one for the humans. Fijians had the longest history of documented cannibalism of any society on earth. (They're completely over it now. Incredibly friendly people. Honest.) And the Fijian name for humans who were on the menu was "long pig."
B. C. (Before Computers) there were lists in many big cities of people willing to share their floor space with passing hippies, backpackers, and whatnot. It sure made traveling cheaper and easier when it was around, and you met the greatest people. Worked beautifully for a while, but then I guess the whatnots got too numerous, and the whole thing kind of melted away. It gives me a warm fuzzy to see open source traveling being rebooted.
The guy is so far off the mark, I didn't even bother going to the original sources. I'm a biologist, university prof, etc, etc, not a climate scientist, etc. etc. Since global warming affects biological systems so much, I'm reasonably familiar with the arguments.
Just a sampling of the nonsense. 1) Hockey stick graph. There was dispute about the first one that he mentions. Some people carped about how if you worked really hard at waving your arms and squinting at the data, you could doubt it. It has since been confirmed. It is so nailed down at this point that he had to refer to the old hockey stick graph, not the current one that goes even further through the roof.
2) Fluctuations in heat from the sun can account for global warming. Think about this. We get fluctuations in insolation every year. It's called summer and winter. The places that heat up the most are the ones that get the most sun, like the tropics, or the places in the summer season. The hallmark of human-caused global warming is night time warming, polar warming, and high altitude warming. In other words, it's not that hot places get hotter, it's that cold places get hotter. You'll notice that the polar ice is shrinking, the Canadian Northwest passage is becoming navigable, the permafrost of the boreal tundras is melting, the glaciers are disappearing, and so on. The BS about solar warming was debunked years ago.
The rest of his points are equally silly. For all of us who are not climate scientists, note that the consensus about global warming among people who actually are climate scientists is up there around 98%. Scientists would rather argue than eat. (Weigh scientists. You'll notice much less of an obesity problem than in the population at large.) They don't come to a consensus unless the evidence is overwhelming. They don't come to a 98% consensus unless there's no point arguing at all. The reason one can find 2% dissenters is that some people will say anything to justify either their paychecks or their preconceived notions. The fact that it's only 2% actually speaks pretty well for scientists, as a group, although 0% would be better.
The big difference between passports and what Homeland "Security" has been doing, is that passports are issued and have worked with relatively few messes. Homeland Security's no-fly lists even had Ted Kennnedy on them, the Senator from Massachusetts. Whatever you may think of Ted, the likelihood that he's a front man for Ansar al-Islam is nil. They've got dead people on their list, including one of the 9/11 hijackers. They've got toddlers. And nobody seems to be able to get off their damn list. So I can just see it: Homeland Security misspells your name once, you spend the rest of your life filling out forms.
I use Kubuntu, so your menu may be a bit different. Approximately, then: Start -> System -> Adept Manager. That's the next iteration up of apt-get, or something, I believe. Anyway, it's a GUI way of installing programs, it makes sure you have all the other stuff the program you want depends on, and it puts the installed program somewhere on the Start menu for you. You may have to hunt around, but it's usually pretty logical. When you click on it and it first opens (after asking for your sudo pswd), you get an absolutely immense alphabetical list of every damn thing on your machine. First thing to do is to "fetch updates." Then scroll down to where your desired program might be, eg Firefox. Click on the left-caret-shaped thingy at the very left, and more details drop down. The button at bottom left says "Request Install" or "Request Upgrade". Hit that, hit "Apply changes" in the menu bar at the top of the window, and you're all set. You can select as many upgrades or installs as you want, and then hit apply changes to do the whole lot at once. Hope this works for you!
I started trying to use Linux in the late 90s, and at that point I couldn't even get the monitor resolution working. Linux has come a very long way since then. Ubuntu is 95% of the way there. But hardware compatibility is indeed the big problem. (Well, that, and fonts. All those damn proprietary fonts that you have to figure out how to install yourself or else all your transferred files look like crap.)
1) Printers. Everybody uses printers. Everybody. What does Linux have? CUPS. It's a great printing system. It's put together and maintained by real altruists. Don't get me wrong. But the user interface is HOPELESS. There's a priceless description of the problems, much better than I could say it myself. Gutenprint is a huge addition / improvement to CUPS. When the GUI frontends work (eg foomatic), they help, but the browser-based GUI isn't really in the ballpark. To begin with, a Windows user would never guess how to get at it. It's not like you can go to Start-System-Printers, and a little note pops up saying "type localhost:631 in the address bar in your browser." I know that many of the hardware problems are due to uncooperative manufacturers not providing data for drivers, but John and Jane Q. Public don't care. They have their own problems.
2) Networking. Almost everybody has home networks. In the good old days, say seven years ago, networking was a nightmare on all systems. Windows users are now used to everything just finding everything and not arguing. Wireless and wired. Linux users have the added problem of having to network across OSs. But however the problem gets solved, a solution is not optional. Turning on your computer and having to fight with networking is a kiss of death for Linux.
Speaking of uncooperative manufacturers, that's not something that any amount of change in Linux can solve. It seems to me that that's a regulatory issue. It's a fundamentally anti-competitive practice, and anti-monopoly laws ought to apply. It wouldn't be fair to require manufacturers to make sure their equipment works with everyone else's, but neither should they be able to prevent others from getting it to work. They should be required to provide the necessary information, which is a government function, not a Linux one.
It wasn't a nightmare, but it's not painless either. The upgrade itself went effortlessly. I followed their instructions for upgrading on the download page, and downloading all the new files took about four hours, but there were no problems with the process. It also updated to Firefox 2.0, the new OpenOffice, and so on as part of it. Settings were saved. So far, so good.
The biggest problem for me was that it lost the wireless connection. Judging by the forums, a lot of people had that problem. lsmod shows that my Broadcomm wireless is loaded, but Edgy doesn't even know it's there. One of the reasons I'm so calm about it is that I didn't do the upgrade on my main computer. The problem would be affecting me a whole lot more if it was interfering with my daily work.
To be fair, I think we need to remember that the Ubuntu folks promise near-perfection on their whole number versions. This is 6.1 Obviously, I and everyone else would prefer perfection right the way along, but upgrading to interim versions is a trade-off between having the latest and helping the debugging process.
... ;-}
The examples they mention are nothing. You have to gown up to work in the pathogen lab, which is inconvenient and annoying, but otherwise there's nothing to it. Dealing with stool samples, likewise. By the time the pathogist gets it, the sample is in buffer and doesn't even smell. (Well, not much.) No, the dirtiest job I've seen in science is extracting fossils from the tar goo at the La Brea tar pits. The fossil work is in digs below ground level. The tar pits are exactly that. It's not just some cute marketing name. Tar fumes are heavier than air. So the idealistic scientists are down there in what amounts to a huge bucket of tar, getting covered in black goo, and breathing chokingly horrible carcinogenic fumes. That's what I call a dirty job.
Security theater, indeed. Searching Granny's jogging shoes has always struck me that way. Not being able to take a bottle of water on board is equally idiotic. But it's all maximally inconvenient and we notice the hell out of it and it's supposed to feel like Somebody is Doing Something.
The sad thing is Soghoian could have pointed the facts out in fifteen scholarly papers, and the government would have blown him off. But when he figures out a way of succinctly getting the real message across, then that's a crime.
Now, I like Ed Markey. I think he's one of our best Congressmen. But on this issue, he seems to have lost his marbles. The security hole is the crime. Not pointing it out.
The BBC article makes for good reading the same way a National Enquirer piece about bat boys does, but other than that: forget it. Evolutionary biology is what I taught at universities for decades, and my first thought on reading that was: this is going to require the invention of a new gene for male choosiness. Then there's going to have to be plenty of selective pressure to strengthen it. In other words, men who are choosy about who they'll have sex with have more reproductive success than the other kind. Biologists define reproductive success as having offspring that themselves reach reproductive age.
Obviously, once people were separated into trolls and Greek gods, the two species wouldn't have a thing to say to each other. But to reach that point, very small differences have to be enough to stop people from having sex. Even women don't seem to be choosy enough to prevent plenty of genetic mixing everywhere on the planet.
I don't know about you, but I think we'll be having faster than light travel long before people swear off sex with everyone who doesn't make the grade. What do you think?
Much as I think TV is suitable only for folks with water on the brain, it's important to remember that a statistical correlation (which is what this is) does not mean that TV causes autism, or that autism causes TV. It's easy to imagine a scenario in which autistic children simply watch more TV because one of the main symptoms of the disorder is difficulty interacting with others. That said, it is a fascinating bit of data, and one that means we better find out what staring at TVs _does_ cause (if anything) before there's nobody left with a normal brain to do it.
One reason why animation that doesn't use an actor's work may persist is that it won't run into the licensing fees, or whatever they'll be calling them in the brave new world. I'm sure in-demand actors will charge suitably exorbitant rates for the use of their emoting skills. Or, more likely, their names.
Not in over 30 years on campuses, which takes me back past the dawn of the internet age. Not at Harvard, not at state schools (Hawaii, Florida, Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico), nor at smaller private schools. I have heard of bandwidth being restricted to computers in dorm rooms, to cut down on bandwidth overload due to MMGs and downloads, but never the whole campus. And never specific sites, as far as I remember. Just overall bandwidth limits. I think I may have heard of hardcore porn sites being blocked, but I'm not sure. (Then again, maybe I'm just oblivious. It wouldn't be the first time.) I would think that if you can't get at given sites even from supervised terminals in the library, then there's a Supreme Court-level academic freedom issue.
The loss of quality is not immediate, or theoretically unavoidable, but the fewer moderators there are, the greater the effect of any individual one. Given that most of us aren't professionals at debating or philosophy, our moderating is likely to be average, and likelier to be poor quality than outstanding. With few moderators, it seems statistically inevitable that over time quality of the comments will deteriorate. (The problem is similar to choosing rulers via monarchy with its tiny sample size of one family, versus democracy with its huge sample size of hundreds or thousands of people with enough education, free time, money, etc.)
Pessimistic message: There's no way for small blogs or forums to guarantee good moderation, unless they find the Holy Grail of leadership: how to consistently find and appoint the most competent people to any given position. Anyone with the answer to that will probably be in line for the Nobel prize.
However, even if perfection can't be guaranteed, maybe something could be done by increasing the randomness of how moderators are selected. That seems counterintuitive, since it feels like what's needed is a _bigger_ effort to select the best. But the track records of efforts to improve selection are dismal. The value of large sample sizes is that randomness is more easily achieved. So maybe what's needed in small groups is a bigger effort NOT to select the best, but instead to improve the randomness with which moderators are selected. Might be worth a try.
First: I don't think it's up to the information pipes to help us catch criminals. I think they should say no to everybody. But there's an asymmetry here. Google participates in reducing freedom of speech in China (even if it's not quite as far down the slope on that as Yahoo). But when it's a matter of catching pedophiles, then suddenly their principles are inviolable?
Sorry. I wasn't clear. My point was that Apple did not coin the term, not when the iPod was introduced. To do some more quoting of Wiki: The term was originally coined by Ben Hammersley in an article in the Guardian on February 12, 2004, meant as a contraction of "broadcasting" and "iPod". Further down: The concept of podcasting was suggested as early as 2000 and its technical components were available by 2001, then implemented in the program Radio Userland. In 2001, the iPod was under development.
There are the folks who say "pod" was adopted from "portable on demand" but I'm sure it's one of those acronyms where the word it spells, in this case something small with neat stuff inside, is really the important part. The fact that Apple latched onto that word is smart marketing. But I don't see the value for anyone, except Apple and other corporations who've lawyered up, in allowing them to own words not coined by them and that are also simply part of the language. They can trademark "iPod". They did coin that, and it does name a unique product. But letting them get away with monopolizing every "pod" out there is just plain silly. At this rate they'll have to go back in time and sue the folks who made the movie about "pod people."
Podcast is obviously derived from iPod
Actually, no. The iPod name came after the word podcasting was already floating around. The iPod is indeed the reason podcast became a household term, but Apple did not invent the usage. (Look the words up in Wikipedia, for a short history.)
Apple didn't come up with this word, so what the hell are they playing at? The whole thing reminds me of that Dilbert cartoon, where Dogbert is called to the rescue when Microsoft wants to patent the ones and the zeroes. Apple needs to remember that customers make money for a company, not lawyers. Lawyers take money.
Admittedly, I'm kind of a geeky one. When I heard about Microsoft's plans to have Windows phoning home about the validity of the software I was using, I decided Win98 would be my last MS OS. That was around 2000, when they came up with the bright idea of allowing people to use the Office suite only so many times before registering. They dropped that after a while, but as far as I was concerned, it was too late to apologize.
Linux, back then, wasn't written for people like me. I'm not terrified of the command line, but I do spend most of my time doing something besides futzing with computer innards (such as biology, writing, graphics). It is impossible, for me anyway, to remember the exact syntax of a command after a couple of months. So I was always having to look stuff up, go over old ground, get it wrong, fight with it some more, and get frustrated. It didn't help that on forums, the commonest answers to questions were variants of RTFM (which I'd done, dammit) or something like "dmesg has all that information," without any hint as to what dmesg was, how to get at it, or what to look for.
Redhat 6 was the first workable Linux distro for me. Ubuntu is a whole order of magnitude better yet. And the other really big deal about Ubuntu that's going to make a difference is the polite, helpful and welcoming tone of their forums. Believe me, legions of n00bs freak out at linux forums. Mark Shuttleworth is onto something there.
At this point, I think if Windows users, not just Win98, could see just how low the learning curve us for Ubuntu, the somewhat-geeks would switch in droves. (For the total nongeek, linux isn't there yet, mainly because of driver issues, which I know are not linux's fault.) Maybe what we need is a "spread open source" movement modelled on "spread firefox."
Let's see. MS was anti-competitive with Windows 3.0, Win2000, WinME, WinXp, and now--I'm shocked, shocked!--with Vista. And the Europeans expected exactly what? Why don't the governments just switch over to Linux? Ubuntu for instance. They could help everyone by getting usability kinks worked out, write any specialized software they need (which they probably have to do now anyway), and just generally Get Over It. Guess who'll be at a competitive disadvantage then.
There are two issues: 1) do you protect bad students from themselves? 2) when and how to post video of lectures?
The first point is a difficult issue. Bad students aren't usually stupid, but they do tend to have bad judgment. So there's a real tendency to think, "Oh, hell. There's two whole months to go. I'll listen to this shit later." Then they never get around to it, wind up with a D or whatever, and feel very let down because the teacher didn't teach them right. This may sound stupid, but there is a valid point. It's a rare person who doesn't need some handholding at some point in their lives to get over rough spots of bad judgment. So how do you encourage them to listen regularly? What I'd try is: post to a password-protected area, hand out the password for the week in class, and allow the video itself to be saved only by streaming the whole thing. The videos would then be taken down after a couple of weeks. Obviously, if somebody really wants to just get the saved version from a fellow student, there's nothing you can do about that. People do have to be willing to be helped.
The second point is much easier. I agree with the person who said audio-only wouldn't work in the sciences. Or the arts, for that matter. Visuals often include copyrighted material that can't be (legally) broadcast, which is another reason to post to a password-protected area. Keeps the publishers' legal beagles off you, because you are allowed to show the materials to your class. That's kind of the whole point. When to post would depend on the organization of the class, but certainly not too many days after the lecture, or it would get horribly confusing.
That was the realistic take for now. Ideally, eventually, the whole video or audio stream of the class, in its best incarnation, would be posted to open courseware, like MIT and Wikipedia have in the works, and anybody, anywhere, could benefit from the effort put into it.