On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 03:16:30PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote: > Not really; TV suffices as vector for parasite memes (have seen > empirical data to show this, though don't have reference to hand), at
There is some more diversity if you're getting your video feeds from the grassroots, but the amount of sewage flooding the series of pipes is certainly higher. Lookit: http://video.google.com/videoranking Do you think you can match that crap by randomly tuning into a TV channel? (Yes, I can filter. I can't, on the TV). > least with PC we're getting back to the stage where kids spend their > time actively doing something rather than sitting there with glazed > eyes passively soaking up a drip feed. Letting a kid grow up planted in front of TV or a PC is not going to be dramatically different. It still results in a mind ruined for good. No hardware can substitute for proper parenting, and education in a good school. > No, it comes from the attitude that excellence is worthless, it's > impermissible to say that one person is outperforming another, and if > a standard is not being met then it is the standard that must be > changed. Okay, I was tongue-in-cheek, but this is not the complete answer to what is going on. There's a change in social climate or some chronical disease spreading across the old industrialized places. Whatever it is, it's depressing as hell. We need something to resurge the old post-war enthusiasm, preferrably something which is a not yet another war. > The "snot-nosed gamer punks" are in large part the ones who are paying > for the continued improvement in computing power, so you might want to Computing power is not equal to computing power. The computer is no longer an all-pupose machine, though it's certainly has gotten faster. I do like things that go beyond SMP, such as Cell and all-purpose vertex shaders, and do hope to see more of it on the classical PC. It is rather sad to see all these transistors sitting there and doing nothing but heat up your room. > think twice about biting the hand that feeds. It's money, but it's dumb money. If it was smart money, we'd have massive parallelism a decade or two ago. Allright, it is much better than no money at all, and w'all timesharing into the corporate mainframes by glass teletype. > Have you ever seen a piece of educational software done right, > and it deployed widely? The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is as > far away as ever. > > Yeah, but Google's here and it works - not just educational software, > but genuine IA. Like I said a little while ago, there's plenty of Google is doing rather a piss-poor job of explaining what IA is. It is probably not the Irrigation Association, or has anything to do with Iowa. I'm hazarding it's something like Intelligence Augmentation, or somesuch. A smart person would have designed an acronym with enough letters that Google would have resolved it easily. (And, in case you haven't noticed, Google is rapidly losing brownie points even among the fanboys due to their cavalier attitude towards privacy, and their rapid turning into a mainstream corporation. Maybe you can do something about the privacy thing, but the progressive coprophagation part is utterly resistant to any treatment save of starting from scratch). > progress to be made, as long as we don't demand that it exactly match > our preconceived notions. There's plenty of progress to be made, for sure. It's too bad I haven't seen a lot of it in about three decades that I'm a conscious observer, and I only have about that much time left as a conscious observer (yes, cryonics, but), and I would rather see something moving visibly. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
