TED Talks: Steven Pinker on the myth of violence

Lurker SneakyLil left a link to this in our comments:

I have only read Pinker’s How The Mind Works, but I believe most of his work to be well worth checking out.

What I would like…

The reason Alan Kay got into the computers in the first place. It’s not about hardware, software, or even user interface. It’s about augmenting human intellect.

I still agree with Alan Kay on most of the things he said. Computer revolution never happened. We still have absolutely no idea what computers are capable of. And we’re still nowhere near the kind of world originally imagined by pioneers of computers where a high school kid with no significant social or economic advantage would be able to gain intimate understanding of the system of the world in terms of sciences and history through the tools of computerization.

I’m beginning to think that the real computer revolution might not have much to do with computers at all. Maybe it about laying out systems of ideas first. Systems of ideas for interaction between certain devices and a human being. Systems of ideas for interfacing a human being with existing knowledge base. Why can’t object oriented programming framework be applied to formation of educational curriculum? Why do we still consider object oriented programming, something that was formed and finalized during the days of hulking mainframes as cutting edge programming technique, in that it finally addresses one significant facet about the act of programming, and thus computing; programming is not about feeding linear list of instructions to a computer, it’s an act of reorganizing ideas into most efficient forms of instruction.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Johannes Caspar said his Hamburg data protection office had initiated legal steps that could result in Facebook being fined tens of thousands of euros for saving private information of individuals who don’t use the site and haven’t granted it access to their details.

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In April, Facebook changed its privacy settings to allow users to block access to the contacts listed in their e-mail, but Caspar argues that the previously saved contacts have not been erased and are being used for marketing purposes.

“It is a system that is designed around making it possible for Facebook to expand, for its own benefit,” Caspar said in a telephone interview.

He said his office had received complaints from “many” people who had been contacted by Facebook after it obtained their names and e-mail addresses through people listing them as a contact.

Germany takes legal steps against Facebook