American education still has a emphasis on liberal education which practically only exists in the anglo world and most strongly in the US. For all the antagonism towards the general curriculum requirements here on HN, which IMHO is a strain of philistinism, our mental life, and the strength of our democracy depends on citizens well aware of the world around them and capable of critical argument. While some are innately born with this ability, a liberal education is the way to ensure it in those who are not.

Beyond this, for our most promising scientific minds are very well served by our educational system. Generally attending a strong public or good private secondary school, they will be recognized early in their ability and encouraged to supplement their mathematical and scientific coursework at a local institution of higher learning. During summers, they will work in the lab of a prominent university professor and get early exposure to research. This will continue in university as they become further familiar with the state of the art as an undergraduate and are better prepared for graduate school than someone without these benefits so early, say in India or China where the state of research is not so strong.

Do some talented individuals fall by the wayside? Yes, but not as many as imagined. The only real criticism of american education is that it leaves those who may not want or be capable of a high status creative profession underserved. But this is a uniquely american calculation in the interests of equity and idealism. We accept some measure of inefficiency here in our educational system to maintain coherence with our national mythos that all men are created equal, an ambiguous but politically useful statement. Otherwise we could follow a german model and single out the talented children from the rest around the age of 10 and send them to different schools. But I can't really imagine this working in the United States.

I think ebooks will go the same way as digital music. Once the market becomes mature enough, consumers will demand the wares without draconion DRM restrictions which currently make the e reading experience unpleasant.

Kindle books are just HTML with the extension changed and some trivial "encryption" on top. The encryption is there to give the publishers some illusion of security -- but if you want to read your books on a computer or other device, it's easy to remove the DRM. Once you do that, open your web browser on the resulting file, and enjoy. (All of your indexing tools that take HTML input files work quite nicely.)

DRM is "evil" and all that, but I don't worry about it since it's so trivial to remove, and always will be. If you can see it, you can copy it.

Would you want a future without content worth buying? Why can't you just live with the DRM?

Next time, I refuse to inflict DRM on my users. It only hurts the people that actually pay. The people that pirate it aren't inconvenienced by DRM at all. That is pretty fucked up, IMHO.

Dead tree books have DRM which works, albeit in a shape which isn't digital. It is a pain to copy a 300 page novel, but you can do it (there are of course copyright limitations). But all DRM systems implemented fail in comparison. Of course, comparing the two directly is hard as they are very different media.

Books work well because: - they don't stop working when the DRM vendor goes out of business (see all the music sites now gone) - you can give them and lend them without problems - they are compatible (i.e. you changing to a new computing platform doesn't mean that you can't now read your books)

When the convenience of electronic distribution with DRM overcomes the drawbacks then you are going to see some uptake, but the drawbacks seem too large at this point.

To have a future with content worth buying, then maybe the business model needs to change? However, book readings aren't quite as attractive as touring bands. So that is going to take some good thinking. :)

I think we are entering an age of consciousness. The realization that we can lie is a natural stage of maturation, a later stage is the realization that lying has negative consequences. Maybe we as a digital society need to go through a similar stage of honest consumerism. Buying things, not because we are forced to, but because we want to give producers an incentive to produce.

We could all smash windows, steal cars, bump locks... security is an illusion. We can defeat it if we want to, but we don't have to. We can all win. Life is not a zero sum game.

A balance will be achieved. If it is not achieved, then the producers will simply stop producing and life will be worse for all of us or at least for the producers or perhaps the distributors.

I don't have the answers, but we are raised to know that stealing is wrong. Honesty is the best policy. Golden rule.

Sounds simplistic, perhaps naive, but maybe that's the answer. Personally, I stopped stealing music a long time ago. Now I listen to streaming radio online or I flip through Youtube videos from the distributors' channels or that kind of thing.

My point is, there are "honest" alternatives to stealing products, digital or otherwise.

I don't know why we create this sense of us versus them. We share this planet. If you make my life better, I want you to be around to continue making it better and I know you need to eat. I think that's the answer. Build a sense of community around the product, the producer, the consumer and the future where we all benefit from our shared existence.

How about wiping out all forms of artificial scarcity?

In the same way, we are always in "Eternal September." Also, Gallium Arsenide: The Technology of the Future. Always Was. Always Will Be.

Maybe we'll hit a wall at the Singularity. I think it will be like hitting a too-low speedbump at highway speed: by then we'll be going too fast to notice it much.

A big part of the problem has been media. Backlit LCD screens are fine for the "workstation" and watching video. But form factors have rarely approached the utility of the sketchbook, (paper) notebook, or scratchpad. The Newton made some inroads here. The high-end Wacom LCD tablets have as well.

To match the utility of paper, the form factors need to be light and thin, approaching the size and weight of a thin standard magazine. They should be always instantaneously available, so should remain on basically all the time. (We can give them 8 hours of charging time back at the desk, but they should still be usable all the while.) The ergonomics of input have to be excellent. If there's a stylus, the feel has to be as refined as the feel of pencils and pens on paper. Interactivity is a must, so long refresh times like with e-ink are unacceptable.

I'm waiting for the day when we can browse and remix our personal libraries with the same facility with which we can browse and remix our music libraries.

Technology seeps into the culture only after decades and lots of false starts. (Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet.")

I'm starting to believe that any important intellectual truths have to be discovered for oneself, and that the only way to do this is to be alone with only your thoughts.

You know. Really? How? What's the basis for your claim?

I confess I'm having a hard time giving you the benefit of the doubt here.

Three of YCombinator's founders have PhD's from Harvard. A number of other users are graduate students, professors, or researchers in industry, and I've never noticed any animus toward them. A significant fraction of the submissions to this site deal with new research, and generally cast it in a positive light. Doesn't all this suggest HN would be more than ordinarily sympathetic to academics, not less?

Also in the FSF office they spend time educating people on open source licenses so that the free software that is written is not abused. Again, something we still need.

secondly, this guy is failing to see that being a "leader" in the field is different from being at the top. Being at the top connotates that one is the best; their abilities are superior to others. A leader can simply be him who recognizes a vacuum in power and seizes it. Being a leader in no way implies that one is at the top of their field.

The best programmers/hackers I've met were quite content to hone their skills without the public attention that only the "leadership types" seem to require.

And if there is a noted concern amongst other nationalities, how much of that is trying to mimic the Americans versus actual concern with being a leader.

I just got back from EuroDjangoCon, and the American speakers were much more evangelistic than the British/Euro/Australian.

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> deluge of poorly written trite?

It's depressing, isn't it. Especially when written by someone who is trying to take on the Mantle of "Being a Leader"

Leadership, evidently.

Google maps are not the problem, the government is.

I don't think it's poor editing on the part of Google at all. Poor editing would be altering the historical record in order to assuage the feelings of one group who might be made uncomfortable. To run with your example, if you're going to alter the map why not go the whole way and replace 'negro' with 'happy black people live here'?

It's a sad but seemingly universal fact that when one social group oppresses another and later people ask 'why are the conditions of (oppressed group) so awful?', the self-serving response of oppressing group is 'they choose to live that way', ascribing their negative situation to some inherent defect on the part of the oppressed.

Unfortunately, this is exactly how Japanese society (and others) tend to "deal with" unpleasant history.

Here's an apropos anecdote: I have a Japanese friend who came to Australia to study. One day, her and her friends were in the city on Anzac day - a national holiday to commemorate war dead, basically. They were standing at a bus stop, talking, when some youths in a car threw some eggs at them. They were, of course, horrified, and had no idea why anyone would do that.

It was only some time later it was explained to her - while the egg-throwing was just stupid, it was probably because she was loudly speaking Japanese in the city, near the war memorial, on Anzac day, and Japan had attacked Australia numerous times, causing many of the dead the day is supposed to commemorate. Imagine my amazement when I realised she had absolutely no idea Japan had attacked Australia in WWII. Just never been mentioned. There were over 100 attacks, in (from memory) 5 places. These are, of course, famous in our culture - it's the only time the country has ever actually been attacked. She had no idea.

Un-fucking-believable. And btw, please don't take this as racist or anything else - I'm just stating facts, and I fear us whiteys do not hold much higher a moral ground - I doubt your average American college graduate, for example, is as well-informed as she perhaps ought to be about her Government's reprehensible actions in Latin America in the second half of the 20th century either.

This is not a censorship issue. This is about being sensitive to the outcome of your actions. Information wants to be free, sure, but some information is hurtful. And as a publisher you have a duty to at least take that into account.

Perhaps this means not adding documents with hurtful slurs in them to Google Maps (especially in a format that can easily be used to aid further discrimination). Or, perhaps a better solution is ADDING information and context to these maps. After all, the remedy to bad speech is more speech.

Obviously Google should have the right to post the maps and line them up with modern-day Japan with no further context, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Google not like a publisher. A publisher would be the one that ordered and funded the creation of this map.

Google is more like a library with a really fast full text indexed card catalog. They take the content from the publisher. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"

Google just created a link to this data in Google Earth. You can add context to the data in Google Earth.

Otherwise - Yes, Mein Kampf is available to everyone who can use internet / library / ...

The things selected for inclusion on a Google Maps tab are an editorial choice. I'm suggesting they are analogous to a "recommended book list" -- a subset of all the available books that a librarian has chosen to highlight. Just as being listed in Google's index is analogous to being shelved in the library. (Surely, no one here is suggesting that anything be removed from Google's index.)

Clear now?

This is more than "cultural sensitivies", Burakumin suffer from outright racism, they cannot get jobs, they cannot marry outside their group. Any informational support for this injustice does not get my support.

This would be a much different situation if, say, Google was being asked to remove links to these maps from their index.

The ribbon almost gives me a stroke every time I have to use office. I've always said that whoever developed it should be drug out into the street and shot. well apparently now we know who it was. The odd thing is that microsoft considered the ribbon a success?! even more stunningly they put ribbon lady in charge of their next OS. I swear it seems that microsofts enemies are making their top level corporate decisions.

This spells doom for windows 7.

I think the ribbon(and all of Office 2k7) was a huge step forward for UI in general, and they executed it amazingly well. (I'm not a fanboy for any side of the OS world, I go between all of the OS's).

My wife is an excellent example of a non-tech user. I surreptitiously installed Office 2007 on her computer when I upgraded her HD and reinstalled Windows. She hated it at first because it was different than what she was used to (Office XP). She hates change as most people do. But as she used it, she got used to the new UI and now has said she loves it and wishes more of her programs worked that way.

I hate to sound like a Microsoft homer, but seriously, the ribbon UI is one of the more innovative and fresh ideas to come out of Redmond lately.

If you honestly think that Apple doesn't do this, then you should compare the user experience from Jaguar to Leopard, while there is a lot of similarity, a LOT has changed as well, and people had to adjust to it.

Just because people don't like change, doesn't mean there should never be change. Isn't that part of the issue that holds innovation back when it comes to Microsoft? They could of done something drastic like Apple and dropped support for their old OS (Classic > OSX) instead of catering to the masses, and probably produced a better product, but they can't upset the masses who are 'used' to things.

On one hand I think it's great that they are trying something new and that trying is the only way they are going to find something that works better. In the case of the ribbon however, I think it falls flat. The reason for this is that it breaks many user interface conventions without significantly changing the context in which these conventions are used.

Imagine making a fundamental change in the way a car works without changing the roads the car drives on.

I disagree that productivity software should be designed to be easy for new/casual users, especially when this design potentially decreases the productivity of regular/professional users. This has somehow become the standard in user interface design in the last ten years and why we have seen little progress in the productivity gains these applications are supposed to provide.