View 321 August 2 - 8, 2004 (original) (raw)
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday August 2. 2004
Home, but it's column time. I have already written more for this site today than I intended, and my desk is piled high with mail, galley proofs, and other work that needs to be done, and of course the column deadline is upon me.
I have a complaint from a long time subscriber that this site has become too political, and he would prefer the politics get sorted out from the rest. I don't blame him. Politics is pretty boring. I try to separate out things that have some long term value or reflect on principles I think important, like Empire and Republic, rather than the more trivial questions of which faction of The Enlightened will be able to tell us Benighted what to do for the next few years.
Alas, it's hard to separate out the important things, like the collapse of our education system from one of education to one of credentialism -- the product of American Education is not even remotely intended to be educated persons, but rather people with the proper credentials, and alas, most of those IN the education system including the teachers and professors no longer even remember what the older system was or what it was supposed to produce. (For those who are curious about what education used to be there is probably no better work than Jacques Barzun, TEACHER IN AMERICA, which is still available here and there.)
The same is true when looking at the future of technology and its impact on society -- which was supposed to be the seminar I was going to conduct at CalTech when Feynman and others were trying to get me on the faculty out there. While the trends are somewhat impendent of who gets to hear Hail to the Chief every few hours, it's hard sometimes to remember this. I apologize.
Anyway, I haven't got a lot of time just now. I need to get into the column, including the Digital Rights Management section I didn't do last month because of other matters. And I have a new Intel board, and it is now quite possible to break away from Microsoft Windows entirely with XANDROS Linux: desktop and servers, you can be Microsoft free and give up little; it will even run much of Office 2000 although I don't know about later versions of Office, and it doesn't do Front Page. But even that is changing.
The world continues to turn, though, and I can't ignore Baghdad and the Iraqi adventure. More on why another time.