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Obama Wants Broadband, Computers Part of Stimulus
damn_registrars writes "President-elect Barack Obama announced in his radio address that his administration's economic stimulus package will include investing in computers and broadband for education. 'To help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.'
He also said it is 'unacceptable' that the US ranks 15th in broadband adoption." No doubt with free spyware and internet filtering. You know... for the kids.
Yeah, sure will provide a ton of jobs to the Chinese who manufacture these things.
Not that I believe investing in education is bad, but passing it off as an economic stimulus is disingenuous.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Was that really necessary to get the story across?
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
It is a fallacy that you need computers in schools. Teach the kids reading, writing and math skills, the rest can come later. Computers are a drain on schools with already tight budgets. We went to moon with engineers and scientists who did not have computers.
Conservative, mod down for violating
"To help our children compete in a 21st century economy"
It's bad enough that I have to compete with cheap "offshore" labor, now I gotta compete against someone willing to work for pokemon cards??
It would be great if the local cable or phone company could run their lines just 1 block further from my nearest neighbor so I could get broadband.
Maybe Obama can make it happen!
You're nothing; like me.
He also wants to use broadband for health care facilities.
Since I know that most of you don't RTFA and the summary is lacking that point, I figured I'd point it out.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
In grade school, we had a handful of Apple IIs (for AppleWorks, Oregeon Trail, Reader rabbit, and a few other educational titles). In high school, the library had a couple computers for the card catalog and CD-ROM encyclopedia, and there were a couple GW Basic/word processing rooms. So why do students need the internet for learning? Wikipedia is nice, but most schools are (rightfully) banning it. Instead of teaching math, should they just give out calculators and provide training for how to press the buttons on a McRegister? If people are graduating high school with a 6th grade level education, all the broadband in the world won't help them.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No doubt with free spyware and internet filtering. You know... for the kids.
Slashdot: News For Nerds (That Can Never Be Happy About Anything)
How many people here are truly opposed to some sort of filtering in computers in school? While the idea of some sort of imposed filter on my internet connection at home is very bothersome to me, I don't have a problem with attempts to keep inappropriate material off of computers in schools.
My biggest concern about it would be that generally the filtering systems aren't that hard to work around, so hopefully the school systems won't waste money buying into a really expensive product that ends up not working any better than a cheaper alternative.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
1. Take a bunch of money out of the economy.
2. Shuffle it though an inefficient bureaucracy .
3. Put what remains back into the economy.
4. ???
5. Economic recovery.
This is the same argument folks in the US use to justify the lack of public transport.
The fact is that the US is 80% urban and suburban, so getting decent services to those folks (in both broadband and public transport) shouldn't be a problem. What is the problem, with internet connectivity anyway, is the deeply entrenched telecoms companies with their local monopolies.
exactly. but i remember hearing a story in the late 90s about the guy who founded Qwest was heir to a railroad company or something. basically, he sold off all the land around the tracks except for a certain number of feet on either side of the tracks. the trains were then outfitted with something that would automatically lay fiber.
this could be total crap, but i don't know.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
Well, despite being an Obama supporter (as am I), Taco is being pragmatic. Eric Holden could be his Attorney General, and he's all for net censorship. Plus this is the Democrats we're talking about; the old guard is salivating at the prospect of getting all their old nanny state legislation back on the plate.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
I work with lots of good Chinese and Indian software engineers. Most never saw a computer before University. They did have a rigorous and old-fashioned education, with lots of math and logic.
I also know talented hackers who got into programming as kids/teenagers, and benefited from the fast dev cycle of Apples, TRS-80s, etc.
But giving kids the latest and greatest computers is not going to help anything. The important stuff can be learned on a 486.
Chinese and Indian schools value the academic achievers, while American schools value the funny, the athletic and the socially gifted. That is why those countries are beating us.
Have them log into Monster.com, et al, and see what the salaries are for various fields, including jobs for those with a "mere diploma", and they will become more interested in College Prep and getting good grades.
So, we go from a guy who cuts taxes and then over-spends to a guy who won't cut taxes but still over-spends. Time will tell, but I have a feeling that Obama's spending will exceed Bush's, just as George "Smaller Government" Bush's exceeded Clinton's. I have a feeling Obama's will be roughly in proportion to the difference in their tax policies. I suppose this is an improvement. Kinda.
What will it take for the electorate to become too ashamed (or at least angry) to keep voting for these people? To paraphrase Penn Jillette, if we keep voting for the lesser of two evils and we're just going to keep getting evil.
-Peter
No offense, but if you think that you can do Math on a calculator, your arguements for better education are kinda weakened. Calculators (yes even graphing ones) are a way to get around the tedium of simple arithmetic, a way to skip past the dark ages and get to the meat of critical, logical thinking.
I analyze water flow patterns as it relates to insurance risk for a living... a mathematical job to be sure. When calculating the trajectory of a projected river overflow, I grab my scientific calculator, and I think back in sympathy for my 4th grade self, who was tortured by moronic ciriculum focused on creating mindless times table memorization, which I could not do...
The main advantage humans have over other animals is that our history and our technology make it possible to learn in one lifetime what could not otherwise be possible in a hundred lifetimes. "Back to basics" is how humanity self-destructs. Give them a pile of computers, have them teach the teacher.
To be honest, *private* school didn't help me. (I don't think I'm qualified to speak for everyone else who attended my school. I'm not that familiar with how the rest of their lives worked out for them.)
I attended a private school between 7th. grade and sophmore year of high school. Today, looking back, I can safely say those were 4 of the worst years of my life. The combination of faculty who insisted on running things in a fascist military style, while often doing a questionable job of teaching the material, plus the abundance of "spoiled, rich kids" did nothing for me. Switching to a public school, after MUCH begging and pleading to my parents, was the BEST move I made.
The school systems DO waste a lot of people's time and money. I just don't think it's always fair to single out "public schools" as the only problems. Private schools currently have the ability to make themselves look good "on paper" by refusing or kicking out anyone who doesn't help them keep an artificially good image. They also tend to hide behind their religious affiliations. (EG. "Come on now, Johnny. Your school can't be THAT bad! You're being taught by Catholic brothers!")
When Obama announced that he was going to start the largest public works program since the Interstate system, I thought he might be talking about an interstate high speed rail network.
Though, after looking through his proposal, I don't see anything about high speed trains. I think a train network would kill many birds with one stone:
- it would provide a fast alternative to flying, which I hate.
- it would cut down on carbon emissions since trains are much more efficient than cars or planes.
- it could do for the country what the interstate system did in the last half of the last century.
- it would create lots of jobs spread out across the country
If this was a story about Bush no one would be complaining. But Messiah Obama, on the other hand... he's untouchable.
Not sure about trains outfitted with automatic fiber laying machinery, but I know about specially made train cars that lay fiber. The nice thing about railroads and fiber is that at the turn of last century, railroads were giving large swaths of right of way for running tracks from town to town. So the railroads usually connect towns together, the same towns that are perhaps wanting digital connectivity. Also, many lines used to have multi track routes, and these have been reduced to reduce maintenane and then you have wide areas where you can lay fiber without much fear of running into many obstacles. This allows easier connections of towns by running cables along the railroad right of way.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
No, I believe you basically heard correctly. I remember that being one of Qwest's competitive advantages at the time they got started. When everyone else was stuck negotiating for rights to use other people's land to place their fiber cabling, Qwest could usually just use the "right of way" land along the sides of the train tracks instead.
I think in the end though, it didn't change much of anything for the "end user/customer". Eventually, the big telcos all found ways to get things cabled up where they wanted to cable them up. Qwest might have gotten it done for less money initially, but they all have similar costs of operation and pricing models today.
Did you miss the (rather conspicuous) use of the word "broadband"? Our network infrastructure sucks quite badly, and if he's talking about upgrading it, that's a lot of domestic blue-collar jobs.
If POBE is really serious, he'll look at giving us real broadband, like the premises fibre that Korean consumers enjoy. If he does that, Corning will have to de-mothball a factory or two, and a lot of people will be needed to dig ditches and pull cable. Sounds pretty stimulating to me.
Growing up, I was greatly helped by the teachers in my public school. My third grade teacher for noticing how I aced the reading test and decided to give me the advanced reading test. I aced that one also. I credit her for putting me on a track where I enjoyed learning instead of being frustrated in school. It is quite possible that all of my success in life could be traced back to her in some form.
Since public school helped me, I guess your "never helped anybody" claim is false.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Oh my Gosh. Here I am the most right wing guy on slashdot and I'm about to go and defend Obama's proposals for infrastructure spending in general, and national broadband and school computing in particular.
a. ubiquity creates new industries. If broadband is something nearly everyone has in the USA, then, you have a much easier time making a business case for a new kind of service. The USA has built railroads with federal help before, knowing that putting railroads would pump the economy, and it did. Then, roads did the same thing. Broadband won't be any different.
b. computers in schools works. Yes, a lot of kids play games on school computers but there will be those kids who are not as well off but interested in learning to program that will use them. I know I'm grateful to all the computer stores and schools back in the 1980s that let me learn programming in the lab and I think that there's other kids like me out there.
Note that I wouldn't restrict this to just computers. I would like to see schools have shop classes with real presses, CNC machines, and other tools of the art so that kids can get some hands on real things prior to joining the real world.
c. My stock retort to other conservatives that would oppose this government spending would be, you had no problem spending 2.5T on building schools and broadband in Iraq, but why can't you support that in the USA?
d. Hands on experience in computing and manufacturing is a national security issue. The USA needs to know how to manufacture its own goods. I would offer as exhibit A, World War II. It's handy for national security when you have a ton of manufacturing centers that can be quickly converted to produce for wartime needs. Indeed, has the USA had a better manufacturing base, maybe we wouldn't have had to wait for five years and four thousand dead to get decent armoured vehicles into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By extension, those who pine for the old cold war days with Russian and for a stronger NATO should also be reminded that a part of our military obligation to our alliance partners is to have an economy capable of sustaining manufacturing in the event our allied economies are destroyed. It benefits Europe if the USA is capable of manufacturing its own products as that know-how can be shared with the continent.
So yeah, I think Obama's on the right track with a big infrastructure stimulus. I think Republicans would be better suited to argue what to build, rather than not to build at all, given that they already blew several times Obama's figure on rebuilding Iraq.
This is my sig.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883617.html
Please shut up. You have no clue what you're talking about. It's almost like you need an education. While education is part of the doctrinal system, the reality is that you have more chance of success at whatever you're doing whether the degree gets you a foot in the door or if you meet other people in your field and develop relationships. Even without all that, you typically make more money with a higher education. These facts escape you because you are too lazy to learn before speaking.
Almost every single technological breakthrough has occurred where? In government or university research labs funded by the state. You would not be typing on a computer and sending a message through the internet without it. The Human Genome Project was a government research program. Every time you take a flight you're riding in a modified bomber, researched with government funds.
So with all due respect, shut the fuck up. Really. Your ignorance is the problem, not spending money on education.
And where are we getting the money for this, again?
Given that the Iraq war has cost a bit over six hundred billion dollars so far, and is estimated to top out at over 1.2 trillion dollars, "from stopping the Iraq war" is a good start to answering the question where the money will come from. You know, you could do a lot with four hundred million dollars a day.
Anybody here old enough to remember the candidates talking about what they were going to do with the budget surplus, back in 2000? Or is that just some forgotten ancient history? Surplus... what a concept!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There are two ways out of a recession as large as what we are facing:
That's a myth. War is not good for an economy.
What the Second World War did for the U.S. economy was to turn the nation into a place of shortages and rationing-- food rationing, gas rationing, even tire rationing... a lot of things didn't have to be rationed, because nobody had money to buy things like new cars.
The one "good" thing that the war did for the U.S. was to give people a rationalization for the shortages and ration-coupons: they were sacrificing to win the war. The economy was terrible, but people felt good about scarcity, because it was for a cause.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Well said. Also thinks are not as bad as claimed.
"the US ranks 15th in broadband adoption.""
You know that saying about lies, damn lies, and statistics? This is an example of lying with statistics. The United States is not some podunk little nation like Korea, but a continent-spanning nation that takes 3 days to drive across, and therefore it makes sense to compare like-to-like:
(1) Russian Federation - 6.9 megabit/s ...
(2) European Union - 6.2
(3) United States - 6.1
(4) Canada & Australia - 4.4 (tie)
(5) China - 2.1
.
The U.S. is only slightly behind its Russian/European neighbors, and significantly ahead of its Canadian, Australian, and Chinese neighbors. That is not a bad position to be. By the way I got these stats from speedtest.net which is based upon actual measurement of the users, and therefore not distorted.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
...why don't you give us teachers:
--Money for books and basic school supplies (paper, binders, text books).
--Salary budgets so we can have more than one specialist (Gym, Music, Art, reading) per 4 elementary schools. These specialists spend their lives going from one school to the next
--Librarians. Most in our district were 'let go' due to budgetary reasons and now parents/volunteers are doing the work. Parents/volunteers are no replacement for someone with 20yrs of experience as a librarian.
--Raises so we can live within 30miles of our school (same goes for Firefighters and Police officers).
I don't need computers when I'm teaching YOUR kids how to read and write, when I barely have enough for books and have to buy school supplies (dry erase markers, paper, binders) out of my own pocket.
Obama is talking about broadband because it's "Sexy". It wouldn't get any attention if he said, "I'm going to make sure all of our teachers have enough textbooks, paper and supplies to teach our kids how to read, write and do arithmetic." Why doesn't he say this, because schools are funded at the state level.... and the towns/states referendums for tax increases to pay for this equipment (books/pencils) are voted down, year after year. The only schools around here that have sufficient supplies are in the higher income towns because the parents are willing to donate $5000....
The Hoover Dam was first proposed, by Hoover, granted, in 1922. His predecessor as President, Calvin Coolidge, signed the bill authorizing it in 1928; it was never a depression recovery project per se, the money had already been allocated before there was a Depression.
Contra Amity "You're all a bunch of whiners" Shlaes, who's work has been effectively discredited by anyone who cared to think about it for five minutes.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
he United States is not some podunk little nation like Korea, but a continent-spanning nation that takes 3 days to drive across,
Which is exactly why it makes sense to have the government work on a broadband project. A similar thing happened with electricity and phones. It wasn't viable for businesses to install the lines so the government took over and installed them out to the remote countryside.
I hope the power grid gets reworked in all of the stimulus, we need that a lot. But having higher broadband penetration will be a good thing too.
A blog about stuff.
You know that saying about lies, damn lies, and statistics?
You imply you know that saying, but then proceed to ignore it. Speedtest.net is nice, but what does it have to do with broadband adoption? Furthermore it is unreliable as an indicator of average speeds in a country, since the sample is self-selecting: only people who are interested in their speed will measure it, which would more likely be people with high-speed connections.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
The overhead of private health insurers averages 35%. The overhead of Medicare is 3%.
The median tuition for their member private day schools in 2005-2006 in the United States was close to $14,000 for grades 1 to 3, $15,000 for grades 6 to 8 and $16,600 for grades 9 to 12. Public schools average cost per student is $13340, and they take everyone, including the very expensive special-needs kids.
The problem with government run programs is not that they're inefficient. They're nearly always more efficient, because they don't have to make profit, and culturally it's unacceptable for the chief officers to self-deal like US CEOs do.
The real problem with government programs is that they're inflexible and rarely innovative. Which means they should only be used for industries for which there is a known, steady, need: Libraries, Schools, Roads, Bridges, Power, Healthcare, a bare-minimum forced retirement savings program (Social Security). Everything else should be done privately.
Oh, I know. Taco did his snark, and you were modded +5 Insightful, because of the Republican/Libertarian cult of the CEO. But just remember that if you're ideology actually worked, Obama wouldn't have to be working so hard to bail us out of the economic mess you got us into.
What makes you think they're only working 40 hours per week?
http://www.mhall119.com
Short answer: We can't. We can't really afford anything at this juncture.
Long answer: We can. There are certain things that private industry absolutely sucks at doing. This is simply the federal government stepping in to do for itself what it should've done a long time ago.
I agree that the bailout sucks, though it seems like a necessary evil at this point. (If the banking system fails, we're really fucked.) Instead, try blaming the people who made the whole thing necessary in the first place.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
A lot of the kids i went to high school with dropped out of school to take up jobs in construction with their parents (whom are only legal since their kids were born here) and typically sent back half of their income to their families across the border. One 16 year old kid i knew was on our track team and worked whatever the maximum number of hours a week you can at that age, and sent all but $100 a week (also about 50%) back to his family. $1000/wk for construction seems a little high. I know drywallers get paid about $20 an hour to do out of town work (dallas to san antonio) but $1000 a week? That seems a little high, is he a bilingual foreman or something? $600 a month may be all they can afford to send after rent, car payment, and gas for their truck (though gas prices have dropped recently). That's still $7,200 a year, plus whatever he spends in mexico while visiting family and buying them gifts there. Sorry to substantiate using my real life experience vs. your article you read in a magazine.
moox. for a new generation.
Maybe you should talk to your administration and union before asking ME for more money.
Why, in addition to my property taxes, do I have to provide a mandatory school supply list designed to keep the teacher in chalk AND kids who can't afford to buy their own crap? I give to charity in church. "charity" in public school is just a hidden tax.
Four years ago when my local school board was crying for more money, I attended one of their open hearings. I asked quite simply, have you done any auditing internal or external of current spending. The answer was 'no'. The referendum didn't pass. Yet, the darn fire department got their first new truck in 20 years (ok, 18, but still).
In exchange for higher pay, are you willing to work 8 hours a day doing community service in the summer? The union screamed high holy murder when this was suggested.
In summary, look in before out. You might find a more receptive crowd around election time if you can demonstrate real belt tightening and real reform efforts aimed at the primary mission of educating children instead of bureaucracy growing and union power building.
Of course, I know you specifically are not the root of evil, but as a poster child simply asking for more money is NOT the way to go.
As for computers, even as a CS major we used shared computer labs. Most schools today already have enough PCs spread around classrooms to make a substantial computer lab or two, and any PC older than 5 years old is perfectly good for both tasks, and are being given away for free everywhere.
Agreed. My high school got brand new HP computers with new LCDs nearly every year while I was there. The entire network was locked down, no roaming accounts (yes it was all Windows), a terrible content filtering system (I disagree it is necessary! Give up already), and hardly enough space on the server for all those 'Windows Movie Maker' projects (120 GB). Half the time, students had no idea how to use WMM so they saved their work as a project, never encoded it, tried to bring it around and found out that does NOT work. The school taught no concepts which I had already learned (in this case, video encoding and what it does). Secondly, the school was a big Microsoft proponent as the classes it taught were almost all for Microsoft products, and the ONLY time they used free software was when they needed audio-editing software and could not find anything good that was cheap but also good. They chose Audacity (I give credit for this move). Schools generally do not trust free software as they do not think it will be quality software. THAT is a big problem. So they stick with licensing Windows (usually through a volume licence), Office (same as above), and all the rest of their software. What browser did the teacher have students use for what should be called 'HTML class'? IE, of course. Sure, MS gives incentives as always but parents need to understand the implications of being locked into MS software, which they never will because they have Windows at home, at work, everywhere nearly. Maybe even their phone and their console (Xbox/Xbox 360).
If it were up to me, would have been desktops (for things like multimedia) and terminals (for small tasks like web browsing and typing documents) all connected to a Linux server with a large hard drive. That is cheaper than buying new PCs every year for literally no reason (the old computers were fine, what's not is running Windows).
Also, if schools want to prevent students from running their games (EXEs), run Linux and do not install Wine.
Spoken like a person who has never driven across the United States. There are regions where you can drive for miles and never see anything except a couple random cows grazing. Comparing this 2500-mile wide federation versus a small country no bigger than Delaware makes ZERO sense. It's like comparing a pumpkin versus a pea... totally illogical.
First, I have driven many times across the US, and while there are huge regions where there's nothing, that's a complete and total red herring with regards to broadband deployment. The only thing those empty regions need is a big fat backbone crossing them to connect the population centers on either side. And our backbone is fine. A lot of it is lying dark simply because it isn't needed, so there's extra capacity there in case we ever fix the situation in the population centers. So the issue of us being a 2500-mile-wide federation is already solved.
Second, we do have sections of the country where the area is as small and the density as high as whatever country you're thinking of, so then what's the excuse? Look at New York City. Here we have 20,000,000 people close enough together that the "wide federation" argument is completely irrelevant, yet still solely considering NYC broadband is pathetic compared to other countries. How could that possibly not be a big enough market? How could the size of the United States possibly be a reason for anemic broadband in New York? Or LA? Or Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and so on and so on.
No. Country size or overall density is not the reason our broadband sucks. Because even when all those factors are resolved, it still sucks.
The enemies of Democracy are
I think the government interference with electricity/phones was a mistake. ... Electricity had already reached 95% of the population by the 1930s. There was no need for that corporate welfare. (I detest corporate welfare.)
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was created in 1933 and is the largest producer of electricity in the United States today.
Not only that, but the TVA also has some of the cheapest and most reliable power too.
/Unfortunately, most of their electricity is from coal
Politicians often create a problem that either (a) doesn't exist or (b) used to exist but has already been solved via the free market.
What free market are you talking about?
Because if we're discussing telecoms and broadband, then the subject is a regulated and subsidized oligopoly, not a 'free' market.
Entrenched business interests have been doing their damnedest since the 1920s and '30s to keep the government from ruining their gravy train.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!