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Spending more on kids is not the answer. If you think about it, an education doesn't require more then a teacher(Most important), some books(Important), papers, pencils and a students. Science, Art, Engineering, and Computers are served by extra materials along with empiric knowledge. Still one can learn about these with only the above required materials. Obviously, one of the reasons for the increase in spending in schools is that it is very labor intensive. But it still very cheap to give group a good education. Part of problem is that starting in about the 60s and going full out by the 80s is a bunch of experimental psychologists turning education on it's head while never having taught children. Look at older 10th grade text books and tests for examples of how little we expect of children in American today. Don't let the school boards waste more tax payer money; instead stop them from building multimillion dollar school instead of a couple of million dollar schools. Fire people who can get the kids educated. Remove nonessential requirements for teachers. Having been taught to file helicopters by someone who started at the same school only about a 4 months ahead of me. I think it would be great to get collage students and recent grades in teaching because they still remember what it was like to seat in that chair as a student. A few people with real world experience teacheing is a big helps.(I had a few lessons from pilots with 10+ years of helicopter, too) Get rid of computers outside of studying them. The best thing for my programming skills was living without a computer in Norway but having access to one for a hour every couple of nights. Taught me how to write code and debug it without actually running it. I learned most of my programming skills (Not the greatest) for around $120 in books.

To respond to the first part of your comment, obviously "what a person can afford to pay" is subjective, and lots of families still don't find their education "cheap" (I have a friend who got roughly $51k of financial aid on a $52k bill, so his family's contribution was only $1k/yr - they still struggled to pay that). But most top schools don't expect students to take out student loans of any form (see this list on wikipedia), and I think most poor / middle-class families will find that their tuition bill at an elite school is smaller than it would be at a good state school; for example Berkeley tuition is $13k/yr for in-state students (not including room and board) and more than double that for out-of-state/international students, while Stanford just down the street has free tuition for any family earning less than $100k/yr. So again, you can argue that elite schools aren't the most needy targets for charitable donations (do we really need to help Stanford extend their free tuition offer up to families earning $150k?), but I don't think it's fair to say that they're actively trying to bleed their students.

Siiiigghhh.. fish farming.. you know, as opposed to getting in your boat and going out to fish in the ocean then being surprised when one day there's no fish?

Oh that's what you mean? Like farmed fish don't need to be fed and don't know massive amounts of antibiotics. Except they do. Farmed fish requires vast amounts of wild caught fish to feed. Daniel Pauly "a professor of fisheries science at the University of British Columbia, has calculated that it takes 2 to 5 lbs. of anchovies, sardines, menhaden and the other oily fish that comprise fish meal to produce 1 lb. of farmed salmon". Because they are packed into small areas they also need those antibiotics, which end up in the ocean leading to antibiotic resistance. Fish farms also create dead zones.

1. Seven Reasons to Avoid Farm Raised Salmon.
2. Fish Farms: Underwater Factories
3. Farmed or wild fish: Which is healthier?

Still think fish farming is the answer?

Falcon

Might the increased amount of biomass serve to improve fisheries?

..But it is (1) not economical compared to fish farming

The thing is is if it's not economical to improve fisheries it's not economical to fish farm either. First is the feed, what farmed fish eat. Carnivorous fish is what's farmed yet for every pound of yield can take several pounds to produce. Another problem is because of the packed conditions farmed fish require large amounts of antibiotics which among other things reduces the effectiveness of those antibiotics. A third problem with fish farming is that it creates dead zones. All of these together means it takes more to farm fish than it does to catch wild fish.

Falcon

Nice post Oski. Must be hard to type with that pole up your ass... :)

As somebody who follows developments in personal cooling technology pretty closely, this is exciting stuff. Some people with MS suffer from Uhthoff's phenomenon. Until they can start integrating thermoelectric into clothing, come up with a few more water-cooled outfits, stuff like this offers heat gimps around the world another useful tool.

When will "professionals" realize that Word is not meant for all documents? It's great for short documents, posters, etc.

I'd like to think that "professionals" have no problem grasping that Word isn't really good for anything. Office drones and beginners may get by with writing shopping lists and memos in Word, but I consider it unfortunate that their sheer number perpetuate the notion that Word is the tool to use for generating documents of any type.

But for real professional looking documents it's hard to beat a typesetter like TeX [or LaTeX].

Agreed, but most anyone can crank out a short document, poster, etc. faster in LaTeX than some else pointing and clicking their way using Word. Long articles and books doubly so.

I submitted the following as a story some time ago. It wasn't accepted so I'm guessing most /. readers are more interested in reading about inconsequential techno-trivia or games. Maybe someone will find it as interesting as I did.

Love at First Byte -- Among the many enduring passions of Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming is only the one with the most pages.,

In the hopes of salvaging this discussion (TFA is a non-story)

Has anyone tried one of these? The priciples behind it make sense:
http://www.sharperimage.com/us/en/catalog/product/ sku__SI758SL2

And since hearing about this development:
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2005/j ulaug/features/cool.html

It makes even more sense, though a neck-worn device is more practical for mobile usage.

People who have these sorts of arguments never seem to have very nice pets. ;) Regardless of what a crusty old book written by some long-dead people has to say about our relationship to the animal kingdom, simple observation of non-humans would reveal the following obvious truths:

1) Animals seem to love
2) Animals seem to miss
3) Animals play, animals cry, animals laugh
4) Animals have saved humans on countless occasions without being "ordered" to
5) Animals pair-bond, or what we refer to as "marry". 90% of all bird species are monogamous, which is quite astonishing considering they supposedly descended from the dinosaurs!
6) And last but certainly not least, animals engage in all sorts of sexual behaviors, not all of which produce offspring. If you enjoy oral sex, as probably 95% of your human brethren do, you're enjoying without procreating. And most of the time it's done in the context of a loving relationship. I suppose hell is a small price to pay. ;)

I don't think that spiritual development (which I also believe in) is somehow mutually exclusive or incongruous with "everything our evolving beings have learned along the way so far while they were still animal-like and not spiritually-aware". To me this is like saying that since we've built up the skyscraper to the great view on the 300th floor, we might as well remove floors 1-100 since we've gone "beyond" those and don't need them anymore. Everything has ALWAYS built on what came before, but has never totally eclipsed it. Cars did not completely replace horse-drawn carriages, calculators did not replace understanding math. Corporations did not replace mom-and-pop stores, and money did not completely replace bartering. Computers did not replace, well, everything (as some of us geeks would have preferred ;) )

So basically, go fly a kite, open your eyes and stop listening to dogma for a minute and THINK FOR YOURSELF, as we're not as different from the animals as some ancient power-grabbing pontificators who had no extensive experience with animals (or science for that matter) would indicate.

On a somewhat unrelated note, Jesus never dictated any sort of religious hierarchy. In fact, I'm pretty sure he was all about tearing those down. Otherwise "The System" wouldn't have been so interested in getting rid of him. And here we are again, with a religious hierarchy trying to dictate its views to us within the sheeps' clothing of the Republican party. Where's Jesus when you need him to f*** some sh** up? ;) /former-altar-boy-now-lapsed-catholic

I had to put on my tinfoil hat for this one, but "Orkut" is really, REALLY old news. The funny thing was, all mention of it has been virtually stripped from Google. "Orkut" is the revival of "Club Nexus", something Orkut built while at Stanford University. You can see a more complete description of Orkut/Club Nexus here.

Also, Stanford mentions it here. It's also been live for quite sometime as Stanford's inCircle. The oldest mentions I can find in Google are from 1991, but then again, Google's been pretty well stripped of information on the subject.

The oddest part, of course, is that http://www.clubnexus.com/ is gone, and purged from the Google cache. Same thing is true of http://clubnexus.stanford.edu/. *sigh*

Anyway, here's Club Nexus/Orkut in a nutshell: "Some people were upset because they're not sexy," says Buyokkokten.

Cheers.

I had to put on my tinfoil hat for this one, but "Orkut" is really, REALLY old news. The funny thing was, all mention of it has been virtually stripped from Google. "Orkut" is the revival of "Club Nexus", something Orkut built while at Stanford University. You can see a more complete description of Orkut/Club Nexus here.

Also, Stanford mentions it here. It's also been live for quite sometime as Stanford's inCircle. The oldest mentions I can find in Google are from 1991, but then again, Google's been pretty well stripped of information on the subject.

The oddest part, of course, is that http://www.clubnexus.com/ is gone, and purged from the Google cache. Same thing is true of http://clubnexus.stanford.edu/. *sigh*

Anyway, here's Club Nexus/Orkut in a nutshell: "Some people were upset because they're not sexy," says Buyokkokten.

Cheers.

A computer is no different than a toothbrush or a hammer. If you tell a toothbrush to brush your teeth, it will brush your teeth, but if you tell a toothbrush to poke you in the eye, it will poke you in the eye. If you tell a hammer to hit a nail, it will hit a nail [or at least it will hit the nail about 80% of the time - the other 20% of the time it will either hit your thumb or miss altogether]. If, on the other hand, you tell a hammer to smash the skull of your thesis advisor, the hammer will gladly smash the skull of your thesis adviser.

If you tell a low level language, like C++, C, Assembler, or, God forbid, your processor's microcode, to delete all the files on your hard drive, then the language will happily delete all the files on your hard drive.

If you tell a High Level Language, like Java, JavaScript, VBScript, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, or ChooseYourPoison, to delete all the files on your hard drive, then the language will happily delete all the files on your hard drive.

If a language/interpreter/environment/operating system/milieu is capable of doing something useful, then it is equally capable of doing something deleterious.

The only perfectly secure computer system is no system at all.

Hybridization does occur naturally, but only in very closely related species (for instance in the Blue-winged Warbler and the Golden-winged Warbler). Species from completely different kingdoms will never mate and succesfully reproduce (this is what we were talking originally).

This barrier between widely differentiated species is nature's safeguard against catastrophic changes in the biotope. A species behaves in its environment according to its genes; changes in the genes will modify this behaviour in one way or another. Drastic changes in the genes have the potential to cause drastic behavioural changes. This could mean the end of the species in question and/or of other species who feed on it, are hunted by it, compete with it for food, or depend on it in any other way directly or indirectly.

GE comes down to removing this natural safeguard. It is and will always remain a risky business.

There is no dirtier example than tobacco
industry pressure to shut down science it
doesn't like. It's a precedent for just
how ugly this could get.

encyclopedia...click here and search for encyclopedia and you'll see what I mean