billswift

That is the revised edition, the first edition of the book was published in 1999, which was 13 years ago.

Your essay was unbalanced, yes open source sucks in the way you complained about, but Microsoft sucks even worse in some ways (if not quite as badly in others). Complaining about something in isolation is easy; everything sucks compared to perfection. But how is it compared to the real alternatives.

Actually with his sloppy writing, I couldn't decide if he was dismissing Planetary Resources or Barclay's and the FT.

As an aside:

>When Plutarch wrote 2,000 years ago "an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all Republics," he was not parroting socialist dogma (1,500 years before the birth of Socialism).

While it may not have been named or had a lot of the modern dogma attached, what could best be described as "egalitarian socialism" is the natural organization of hunter-gatherer bands. Which is why, though it works poorly for anything larger than a band, various "socialisms" regularly re-emerge throughout history.

You have to force or trick yourself into changing habits, the problem with habits is that they become automatic responses to some stimuli; enter "habit change Wood" into Google Scholar for some interesting reading, especially a pdf of http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/15/4/198.short , which is the single best article I have found.

"Explaining" things that they don't understand is a hallmark of journalists, especially the so-called professional ones. Their knowledge of firearms, to take a really long-running example, was apparently acquired by watching made for TV movies.

Threatening to invade an embassy is.

No. I remember a situation, though no longer the details, where someone was accused of spying during the Cold War and fled to an embassy. He was effectively trapped there, just like Assange, but whoever was after him didn't violate the embassy. Like I said, I can't remember the details, not even the country involved, but I think he ended up spending several years confined to the embassy.

>This is just conspiracy theory.

Somewhat, which is why I never weighed in on it before. But if the UK is threatening something as unusual as invading an embassy, that is evidence that there is likely to be something more to the issue.

If the UK really is threatening that, then that is more evidence that the Swedish charges are politically motivated rather than being from an actual crime.

"Nothing is hard to the person who doesn't have to do it themselves." Old quote, I have no idea the original source.

Pendarvis Theory of Technology: "..., it is my theory that everything wrong with everything is the fault of language teachers.

"If a child is taught that it is all right if you mis-spell a word occasionally, or don't always punctuate exactly correctly, then you are teaching that child that small mistakes are okay, as long as people know pretty well what is meant. I feel this is a dangerous attitude to foster in a highly technological society."

from William Tuning's novel Fuzzy Bones

He goes on with an example that could have come from what I have read about one of the difficulties that contributed to the problems at Three-Mile Island; not paying enough attention to what the instruments were saying (as an example of inadequate attention to detail).

Steve Allen's Dumbth ( http://www.amazon.com/Dumbth-Thinking-Reason-Better-Improve/... ) discusses how things have broken down in general over decades; and it long pre-dates the texting and Twitter used as excuses for sloppy grammar several of the essays' writers fall back on.

Already posted, with a decent discussion, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4365925

Decent article, but I wanted to add a little extra warning to this:

>One way to do this is to look at past returns and come up with the historical correlation.

Be very wary of historical correlations, at any level. I am old enough (I was in my early teens) that I can remember the screaming of economists during the 1970s stagflation - it was known that you could not have high inflation and high unemployment at the same time. Until we did.

He also confuses, maybe conflates would be better, art and design. For example, his statement that black over-powers everything else only applies to black masses - thin black borders or underlining is the best way to focus attention on critical points on a web page without being distracting the way bright colors can be.

>My weakness is thinking that when I first grasp an idea, I think I'm done.

That isn't always a weakness. What he was missing was deciding how deeply he needed to learn the subject first. Depth of Knowledge refers to how thoroughly you know and understand what you have been studying.

Sometimes "recognition" is enough, you know it when you see it, the information is familiar and you can relate parts when both are presented separately. Very useful for multiple choice tests and for covering a lot of ground quickly when you mainly want an overview and to be able to look things up easily if you ever need more.

Remembering information, memorizing lists & facts - building up your internal data bank. Working from memory you can present key facts and relationships that you have studied. This is a necessary foundation for deeper learning. If you cannot remember details, then you cannot reason from them. Too often this step is skimped in modern schooling; rote memorization is often necessary for real learning to take place. The most important thing to remember here is that you must PAY ATTENTION to what you are trying to remember. Repeated exposure is necessary for memorization - but you also have to pay attention to the material. The better you pay attention, the less it will need to be repeated for real learning to take place. Having a theoretical framework for the material to fit will also help since we remember mostly by association, this helps recall that. Recall is best tested by fill-in-the-blank type tests and short essay-type questions.

Because memorization is so time and effort intensive, don't waste your time memorizing things that are not important. First, you must remember the basics - arithmetic, spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. Next, you must remember things that you may need without time or references available when you need them, first aid and various other emergency skills. While learning, you need to memorize things that further learning will depend on, the basic facts and relationships in whatever field you are studying. Finally, when actually working in a field, you need to remember frequently used information that it would waste considerable time looking up repeatedly. These are also important to keep in mind, because to keep things memorized, you need to refresh the memory periodically. The first and last categories you will actually keep refreshed, if you are conscientious in their use by using them. The hardest to keep up on is the second category, emergency skills.

In the third level of knowledge, you understand the material and are able to explain things in your own words. You can draw new relationships between facts. You need to be able to remember details to explain things in your own words - for a long time I deluded myself that I could understand the material because I could follow along with the explanation easily enough as I read it. But you do not truly understand something until you can explain it in your own words from memory.

Finally, you can use information in papers and discussions to articulate and defend what you know. You know the subject well enough to do independent, original research. Here you are learning in your subject primarily by working in the field rather than from others.

>But what do we do when WE are the problem?

Find something outside yourself to focus on. Some quotes:

>The more I reflect on this question, the more convinced I am that man's fundamental purpose is to achieve; in other words, the striving toward goals is an end in itself. ... Viewed in that light, it would seem that striving itself - the constant working toward goals - is man's real purpose.

- - Robert J Ringer, How You Can Find Happiness During the Collapse of Western Civilization

>In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

- - fortune-cookie, no attribution

>The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

- - William Cowper

>To be of use in the world is the only way to be happy.

- - Hans Christian Anderson

>We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

- - Charles Kingsley

And Eliezer's post on how having "Something to Protect" gives meaning to life, http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/

Something to protect is the most significant from your comment's view, fear of risk to your "something" is the strongest driver around.

Actually, the common slang you wanted was "a kick in the ass" or less vulgarly "a kick in the seat of the pants", as in this book's title, http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060155280 . An "ass kicking" is slang for a beating.

Another good reason for using fictional examples when it fits your argument is that their contexts are more limited and less likely to trip context-driven ideological or emotional biases.

I am not sure exactly what the newspaper's claim is, I didn't see any links to a technical paper that I could follow up on. But I understood behaviorally modern humans to have been around for about 50,000 years. Are they just claiming that modern humans reached southern Africa earlier than previously thought?

Usually both. (Note that with the internet you also have to be dumb, too, to believe you are not eventually going to be caught, no matter how malicious you are.)

When a walled garden actually is better for users, they could choose to participate. When users aren't allowed to choose, you can be pretty sure who the primary beneficiary is.

One critical thing is to make sure you are comparing yourself to an actual, achievable potential; not an impossible fantasy.

As the proverb went, It's bad enough comparing yourself to Isaac Newton without comparing yourself to Kimball Kinnison. Eliezar Yudkowsky, http://lesswrong.com/lw/y7/the_super_happy_people_38/

A few years ago, when Eric Raymond was complaining about proprietary GPS related "standards", http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=888 , I drew what I think is a useful distinction in a comment:

An “unreleased standard” is not a standard, it’s a specification. Conversely, a standard is a shared specification.

And the same could be said for proprietary "standards". But in the case of HTML5, they are both open standards, just with different "forms of presentation", I guess would be the most useful term. One is a moving, transient standard, the other (W3C) is a series of snapshots.

I've heard this said often enough, but most of the homeschoolers I actually know or know of indirectly are pretty lefty or libertarian. Most Christian extremists go to little private schools which are scattered all over the place.

There is also ego-boos for "those in the know", especially those at the very top that make the policies. Never forget that companies are made of people, and people have their own goals and biases that don't necessarily benefit the company.

And there is Feynman's point that it is less embarrassing to prove yourself wrong, especially if you can do it before you publish.

This isn't anything but a repetition of the common claims about patents. He gives no evidence or no original interpretation of the commonly available evidence. This is nothing but argument by assertion; completely worthless.

You'll have to google around to find a copy, but the discussion of the value of patents by the guy that invented the Workmate work bench is much better.

Skill knowledge, such as programming or writing, takes time and practice.

Deep skill knowledge, the ability to work on hard problems, requires that you practice working on hard problems.

Studying the underlying knowledge that supports skilled performance, in programming that would be computer science, especially things like algorithms and data structures, can speed things up, but the practice is essential.

You're still a bit ambiguous, even after the edit. If you want the real fundamentals of programming, then you need discrete math, algorithms, and data structures; everything else is built on those foundations. Programming as a skill, you can get by without them, just as a carpenter doesn't need to know mechanics. But really understanding computer science without them would be like a mechanical or civil engineer that doesn't know classical Newtonian mechanics.

I don't feel comfortable giving specific book recommendations, because I have no way of knowing whether the ones I own or have read are much if any better than most of the others out there; and you can look up reviews on Amazon probably easier than I can.