This is a subject that is very dear to me, so I will try not to rant about it.
There are a couple of things "wrong" with the way we teach kids computers today.
Our educators are in the hands of the masters of consumers. When a new technology comes out, we all abandon the current stuff, and engage in the upgrade cycle. Repeat until generations have no clue any more about what the old ways were.
This is an absolute falsehood pushed upon society by those who wish to control the consumer base. It is consumption destroying education, plain and simple.
The point is this: Every C64 that was ever produced - heck, every 8-bit computer, ever - STILL WORKS, or can be MADE TO WORK in the area of computer education.
It is absolutely arbitrary that computers get old. Every machine that was ever made, is still just as useful as it ever was - the difference is, the user walked away (because they are consumers not users).
I have a large collection of 'antique' computers in my midst: C64, Atari, Oric, Atmos, Telestrat, MSX, heck .. even a BeBox and an SGI O2. All are still working, all are still quite capable of engaging a young mind in the exercise of exploration and discovery that makes a good developer.
And, my 3 year old and 6 year old kids LOVE THEM. They absolutely LOVE the old sprites, the old simple ways. The 6-year old takes immense joy out of typing:
.. into an old Oric Atmos thats been set up exclusively for him to be able to do that .. in fact the very first writing he was able to do was in typing in a BASIC PROGRAM!!
The 3 year old absolutely loves that he can turn the machine off and on, and off and on, and off and on .. and it will still work. Can't do that with Daddy's workstation!
So the point is, parents: disconnect your kids from the consumer trap. Give them old computers to learn computing on. Everything they will ever learn, WILL STILL BE VALUABLE TODAY when they 'grow up and get a bigger computer' - the reason is, because computers still work, fundamentally, the same way.
I predict my 6 year old will be hacking in assembly by the time he is 10 - just like his Dad did. And thats what made me the developer I am today.
(BTW: yes, I also have rPi's, Beagleboards, and so on.. when they're ready, they'll be available to the kids to hack on. But if the kids can't do their own low-level programming by the time they get the rPi dusted off, I will be very surprised..)
EDIT: Another thing that is 'wrong' with computers today, imho, is the decoupling of development from use. Again, our computers have been turned into consumption platforms - the moment that Microsoft removed the developer tools from being part of the base OS image, computers started to lose a lot of value. Any OS that doesn't ship with a way of building apps for it, inherently included by design, isn't an Operating System - its a Consumer Capture System.
Do everything you can to get development tools back into the OS, people. It is more important than the desire to reduce the effect of having 'too many smart developers out there'..
>Can a very minimal gcc be written which would be capable of bootstrapping the entire gcc compiler?
Yes. In fact, this is how gcc is built - in stages. First stage: build a compiler that can build the compiler. Recompile the compiler with the newly built compiler. Do it again. Repeat until completion. ;)
I was impressed by his lack of interest in Harry Potter, as I consider it a pox on modern culture, but saddened by his lack of interest in music. To each, their own .. but I hope he discovers something frivolous and trivial, whether its music or trashy fiction, at some point in his life to enjoy. Genius without frivolity is often a fast road to torture and anguish, a fact that wouldn't be true if it weren't for the fact of the existence of both music, and trashy fiction, in perpetuity ..
There is no better way to treat Genius than to let it propagate, and no better way to propagate knowledge, socially, than a hacker space. Sure, he could try to go to school - and he should - but getting others involved in his hacker projects is a lot more achievable.
Every time I see these Venus pictures, I think about all the dull, lifeless, empty places on Earth that a spacecraft could land in, and lead us to conclude that there's nothing of any interest there.
Of course, I trust the scientists, but its sure fun to think we landed in some Venutian-preserved national park, where no Venutian dare go, for fear of incurring a trespassing ticket or two..
Actually, its a view supported by evidence, whereas your view is supported by .. superstition, scientifically described but nevertheless: still superstition.
You didn't post any evidence, but lots of theory, whereas there is plenty of evidence that the human species does indeed manage to survive .. in spite of ones best efforts.
please post enough evidence, which conclusively says we are not even scratching the surface of earth's resources and it is cool to increase population to 15 billion by mid 21st century and pollution is not due to humans and global warming is a sham created by Neo-hippies.
What I know of the Pirate Party is that they are suffering for their own collective weakness and inability to organize.
It is a fallacy that 'safety in (representative) numbers' is a way to organize a movement; big social movements need leaders who are able to demonstrate the cause, and Liquid Democracy dilutes this fact as much as it can - not because its proponents want to be successful, but because the idea of a benign leadership is abhorrent to those who want 'no leaders'.
Like it or not, we live in a world where nothing gets done if it depends on a committee to do it. This is a very difficult thing for the Pirate Party to deal with; since almost everything the Party tries to do must conform to the rules of consensus implied by the Liquid Democracy policies.
The Pirate Party's leadership is hamstrung by the requirement to get approval for everything, from their masses. Everything.
Eventually, the same thing will happen to the Pirate Party that happened to Socialism: its proponents will learn that capitalisation is very important to getting new ideas propagated among the masses. So far, the PP does not represent much of great value to the individual, and it has a very difficult time even agreeing, internally, on how to create any such value to sell to the people..
>almost everything the Party tries to do must conform to the rules of consensus implied by the Liquid Democracy policies.
Ever now and then somebody will pop up in the Pirate Party UK and suggest that we adopt Liquid Feedback like the German party does, and this is one of the most important reasons why we don't.
The UK party has a much more centralised leadership, while still facilitating membership decision-making over policy.
>The main failure of this article is that it assumes that social problems are outside biology and that they are easy to solve.
The main point of this article is that the archeological record proves that this is the case. 200,000 years of evidence suggests that, in spite of our superstitions, we humans are capable of managing our resources and replenishing the world from which we derive our sustenance.
Are you sure you're not just harboring a fixed superstition on the subject, which has just been challenged?
Can we all agree that the amount of humans which the Earth's (mass/surface area/volume/energy/environment/resources/what-have-you) can support is finite? Can we also agree that the ideal number of humans on Earth is somewhere between 0 and this finite limit?
In this case, I would simply argue that the ideal amount is somewhat lower than the amount of humans which would necessitate covering the entire Earth's landmass and oceans with a planet-sized city, obliterating all natural landforms and all species except those found in factory farms and zoos.
I guess what I am trying to say is, if we consider overpopulation not to be a problem, then we must believe that humans are wise enough to stop multiplying before Earth becomes a monoculture. This is the argument that I find hard to believe.
> The main point of this article is that the archeological record proves that this is the case.
DO you know what they say on Wall Street? "Past performance is no guarantee of future returns"? The same rule applies to biology. The reason the future diverges from the past is because it's guaranteed to be different. As to human population growth, there's no basis for comparing the future to the past. But I will say this -- on at least one occasion in the past, humans were nearly wiped out by just one volcanic eruption:
Quote: "The Toba catastrophe theory suggests that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory is based on geological evidences of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidences of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation with humans."
Ten thousand humans. The only reason we survived as a species is because of chance, not destiny. And that event is easily seen in the genetic record -- it's very likely to be just one of many examples where we survived only by chance, on a planet where 90% of all species have been wiped out.
> Are you sure you're not just harboring a fixed superstition on the subject ...
I just quoted the scientific record. I can also describe the Logistic function, a scientific biological modeling tool that reliably predicts the future of species who try to exceed the carrying capacity of their environments:
.. okay, fine: then you go and see how we've managed our resources in .. oh, lets just take - The Whole of Europe - and compare.
Just because some humans 'are stupid' doesn't mean all humans are. There is a lot of evidence that we, who choose to manage, will outlive those who choose to be stupid. 200,000 years of it, in fact.
(Stupidity might be contagious; the point is though: so is intelligence.)
There are a couple of things "wrong" with the way we teach kids computers today.
Our educators are in the hands of the masters of consumers. When a new technology comes out, we all abandon the current stuff, and engage in the upgrade cycle. Repeat until generations have no clue any more about what the old ways were.
This is an absolute falsehood pushed upon society by those who wish to control the consumer base. It is consumption destroying education, plain and simple.
The point is this: Every C64 that was ever produced - heck, every 8-bit computer, ever - STILL WORKS, or can be MADE TO WORK in the area of computer education.
It is absolutely arbitrary that computers get old. Every machine that was ever made, is still just as useful as it ever was - the difference is, the user walked away (because they are consumers not users).
I have a large collection of 'antique' computers in my midst: C64, Atari, Oric, Atmos, Telestrat, MSX, heck .. even a BeBox and an SGI O2. All are still working, all are still quite capable of engaging a young mind in the exercise of exploration and discovery that makes a good developer.
And, my 3 year old and 6 year old kids LOVE THEM. They absolutely LOVE the old sprites, the old simple ways. The 6-year old takes immense joy out of typing:
.. into an old Oric Atmos thats been set up exclusively for him to be able to do that .. in fact the very first writing he was able to do was in typing in a BASIC PROGRAM!!The 3 year old absolutely loves that he can turn the machine off and on, and off and on, and off and on .. and it will still work. Can't do that with Daddy's workstation!
So the point is, parents: disconnect your kids from the consumer trap. Give them old computers to learn computing on. Everything they will ever learn, WILL STILL BE VALUABLE TODAY when they 'grow up and get a bigger computer' - the reason is, because computers still work, fundamentally, the same way.
I predict my 6 year old will be hacking in assembly by the time he is 10 - just like his Dad did. And thats what made me the developer I am today.
(BTW: yes, I also have rPi's, Beagleboards, and so on.. when they're ready, they'll be available to the kids to hack on. But if the kids can't do their own low-level programming by the time they get the rPi dusted off, I will be very surprised..)
EDIT: Another thing that is 'wrong' with computers today, imho, is the decoupling of development from use. Again, our computers have been turned into consumption platforms - the moment that Microsoft removed the developer tools from being part of the base OS image, computers started to lose a lot of value. Any OS that doesn't ship with a way of building apps for it, inherently included by design, isn't an Operating System - its a Consumer Capture System.
Do everything you can to get development tools back into the OS, people. It is more important than the desire to reduce the effect of having 'too many smart developers out there'..