Still, one can openly admit in most countries in the Americas that the indigenous peoples were mistreated, and in many cases whole tribes and ethnic groups were wiped out, without some crazy ass Mexican, American or Chilean hackers shutting down your website.
I don't know about Chile (having never been there or met any Chileans), but I get the impression that Mexico did a much better job of preserving the native culture and absorbing the Spanish into it (rather than the other way around) than the United States did. (I'm not saying Mexico has necessarily done a good job, just that it's been less bad than the piss-poor job the US has done.)
The Net Neutrality regulations were a major overstep by the FCC and SHOULD have been a law passed by Congress.
The Net Neutrality regulations WERE a law passed by Congress! Specifically, Title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, etc.).
The FCC isn't doing anything "new," it's just reclassifying Internet service providers from one category ("information service" to another ("telecommunications service"). And it's putting them in the category that they should have been in all along!
In other words, the FCC fucked up in 2002 when it made this ruling (where it exercised "forbearance" by not classifying ISPs as telecommunications services, even though the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that they were in fact telecommunications services), and now it's fixing that fuck-up.
I was speaking specifically in the context of Net Neutrality. The Democrats have done plenty of "regulating incompetent[ly so as to be] fostering an environment of graft and corruption that fucks over the public" too, but they've done it in other contexts.
It locks in profits for big incumbent players while blocking innovation and competition.
You say that as if it didn't already happen anyway.
Here's a newsflash for you: there is no "free market" in telecom. It does not exist. It has never existed. It's all regulation, all the way down.
In actual reality, we have exactly two choice:
You'll note that not regulating at all IS NOT A GODDAMN CHOICE, so anyone who prefers option 1 to option 2 in the name of imaginary "competition" is either a shill or a moron.
Step 1: Create a shell script that logs your install command before executing it. Something like this (warning: this is barely tested, and I have no idea what it will do if you pass it arguments involving fancy shenanigans like quotes and pipes and whatnot):
#!/bin/sh
prog=apt-get # or 'yum' or 'emerge' or whatever
echo "$prog $*" >> ~/install-commands.txt
$prog $*
Step 2: Alias your shell script to the name of whatever command you're replacing.
Step 3: Install software as usual. Each time you install a package, it will be logged in install-commands.txt.
Step 4: When you need to reinstall your programs, run `bash install-commands.txt`
(Also note: if you use a GUI to install software, you can't easily do stuff like this. Now you know why the command line is better.)
Never underestimate the power of visceral, illogical squeamishness.
Of course, the fact that "prison with corporate sponsorship?" was even a reasonable possibility is pretty fucking sad in and of itself.
So as long as I don't do anything 'considered' malicious to a system I'm not supposed to access, I should be given a pass?
When you're a damn middle-school kid? Yes!
Doesn't every computer geek who grew up in the 90s have a story like that? As far as I'm concerned, benignly hacking your teacher is a completely normal and expect part of growing up!
If all schools start reacting to that kind of thing like the one in TFA did, they really will need H1Bs because all the Americans who otherwise would have become developers will be in prison!
Well, if folks would calm down they'd realize that this is more likely just an attempt to scare the kid and set and example
SO?! That's still NOT OKAY!
What you've just described is a police state using tactics of fear and intimidation to subjugate the public. That's what you're defending here!
Moral relativism is not a valid counter-argument.
I'm not talking about no longer being able to trust Apple for yourself, I'm talking about no longer being able to trust Apple on behalf of everyone else. For example, I used to insist that my mostly-computer-illiterate parents use a Mac, because that would keep them safe. Now it will not. (And no, they're not competent to disable the cert themselves.)
Similarly, it is now flat-out unethical to recommend using an Apple computer to anyone, because it is proven that Apple prioritizes the well-being of Chinese hackers over that of their users.
What you're suggesting is we have a country where the majority of the population are dullards who can't produce even a single thing, while other countries, China and India in particular, are working hard to increase their scientific and technical literacy, introducing CS as a core skill from gradeschool on up, and continuously increasing both the quantity and quality of their industrial output.
Not at all. What I'm suggesting is that -- if it is indeed true that China and India are attempting to teach all of their students CS -- that a large fraction of them will be incompetent at it too. (Of course, that's not what those countries do: they teach only the good students and pretend the others don't exist at all in order to make their statistics look good.)
The point is, I don't doubt that making CS a core class would result in more people having programming skills, simply because not everyone who is capable of learning it actually does so yet. However, enough people can't -- in any country -- that if you try to make everyone do it many of them will fail.
If we do this, we should at least have the decency to let students drop it after elementary school, instead of torturing them by trying to force them to do something they're fundamentally incapable of.
The flaw in your hypothesis is that the problem manifests itself before the students even get much past "Hello World!"
If you read the article I linked, you'll find that CS students' success is highly predictable based on the results of a pre-test -- administered before the class even starts. Programming, fundamentally, is about synthesizing a mental model of the system and then applying it to solve a problem, and many people just can't do that.
Actually, maybe that's the answer! Unlike every other subject taught in gradeschool, computer programming really requires operating at the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy in order to achieve success. In math, rote memorization (at least of procedures like long division, if not straight-up times tables and such) will get you a long way, at least until you hit things like calculus or formal proofs. In english, rote memorization of grammar rules and/or the contents of a book will get you a long way, until you get to college and are expected to analyze the "themes" of something. In science, rote memorization works, until you get to college. In social studies, rote memorization works, until you get to college. In CS, rote memorization just fundamentally doesn't work, even for trivial problems.
Waste not, get your budget cut next year.
