Increasing what the schools are trying to teach are problems solving techniques and critical thinking.
No they are NOT. That is, in fact, the problem.
And they can't do that, because standarized tests rule the education system in the US.
If their students are bright and creative individuals who make, to make up a number, 145 on a certain test because they know how to do some meta-version of the problem, and have to figure out how the rules apply to that, and some other school makes 150 because their students know exactly what keys to punch into a calculator...the second school wins. The first school gets punished.
But next year, the second school could get some learning disabled students and make a 140, so it's all fair.
That's not a joke, that happened at my school system, luckily after I had left. A family with like eight adopted special needs children moved in, so funding dropped because the school did worse on its tests. Yup...more handicapped people means you need less funding. (Yes, the school did get more special education funds to handle the kids, but it was less than the funding drop.)
Of course, when they left, our test scores rocketed!
Now, it's possible you aren't in the US, and what you say is exactly true. It's no in the US, it's about the opposite of true.
If you want to know what's wrong with the schools, talk to a teacher...they know, and they've known for a while. Feel free to disregard complaints about low pay and teach accreditation...they're right on these things, but it could indeed be biased. Ask them instead about tying funding to test scores.
You probably could have done the same thing by modifying the calculator to actually have a key there, as I suspect it was 'removed' by taking the metal that completes the circuit off the rubber sheet. Or even placing some tape something under the sheet right there.
However, I think these were the state's calculators, and they passed them out at tests and took them back at the end.
You could always just stab though the key with a screwdriver, though.;)
In fact, due to the inability to type in factions in HTML, and order of operations, you can actually add it as is without any fractions. You just press the division key for/.
Or is HP providing a calculator without a division key now?
What you mean is the calculator wouldn't convert the result to a fraction.
Education is, at this point, seriously fucked up. Not due to the teachers, but due to 'standards' and testing.
We're not teaching people how to 'convert fractions to decimals'. In fact, there is no such skill...that's just division.
And 'converting decimals to fractions' is just reducing fractions, except the denominator is always a multiple of 10.
Why do we care about that? Why are we pretending that's a skill? Because it's on the standarized tests.
So schools are completely unable to link concepts together, because that's not on the tests, so students have, for the last few decades, been memorizing steps in math, as if that teaching you something.
And then calculators came along to do the steps isntantly, thus explosing how inane the entire system was. Solution? Ban calculators, or cripple them or have vehement debates about them.
I'm for giving children calculators at all ages under every circumstances. Why? Because maybe they'll be able to figure out rules on their own, because the school sure as hell won't teach them.
The only time I can see an exception is the first grade 'memorize your addition tables' tests and so forth, but I think that's a fairly idiotic thing anyway. If they have to keep using something, they will memorize it eventually.
And just on general principles, I don't think we should pretend the world works differently than it does. Not only because we are trying to prepare students for the actual world, where they have calculators, but because this really pisses students off who are old enough to understand what's going on, and a large part of the failure of schools is them doing things that students see are completely bogus.
Don't defendants in counrt have the right to call any witnesses that are relevant to their case?
If the operation of the breathalyzer has been deemed relevant, can't they just get the court to order company officials to show up and testify?
Forget all this screwing around with the state government and getting information from them...if your device says I am guilty, I have a right to question you in court as to how the device works.
Of course, it doesn't matter, as they are being let off...but that raises the question of why the prosecution isn't subpoening the company officials.
Breathalyzers don't work anyway. Anyone who gets subjected to a breathalyzer should immediately demand an actual blood test.
A large percent of the time, the blood test will show you a BAC that's.03% or.04% lower.
Why? Because breathalyzers are guessing. For one thing, your BAC is due to your mass, which the breathalyzer has absolutely no way to tell. And how fast you digest alcohol, which, again, it can't tell.
This is in addition to the fact they can't even do what they pretend to do, figure out how much alcohol you consumed. (Which has almost no relation to your BAC.) How much alcohol you exhale is due to how your stomach and throat works, it's not a constant.
Breathalyzers are the stupidest concept, ever. No one should ever be convicted based on them. They're useful for proving 'I smell alcohol on his breath, so I demanded he take a blood test', but they shouldn't be used for anything else.
And one reasonable person who sees a cop and drops down from 10 over to 5 mph below the speed limit because they don't want a ticket is even more likely to cause a pileup.
Man, you've like got it 90% of the way, and then got confused somewhere. (And, yeah, I'm in a UCC state.)
A contract requires four things--an Offer, Acceptance of that Offer, Consideration on both sides (i.e., something of value from each side to the other), and a Legal Purpose.
A purchase requires an Offer made and Acceptance of that Offer. (Without consideration on both sides it's called a 'gift', but is otherwise the same thing.)
A contract merely requires Consideration on both sides and Acceptence of the contract by both sides. No 'offer', although for some reason people often try to assert so. An offer is made by one side, whereas a contract is made by two.
Think of the difference this way: In a contract, both sides agree independently. It is written out, and signed in a random order. If I sign, and then change my mind before you sign, I'm screwed. You can still sign and make it a valid contract.
OTOH, if I go the store, and the cashier offers me a price of $100 dollars, and then realizes I'm the guy who shoplifted last week, he can withdraw the offer if I have yet to pay.
That's just the most blatant difference, because things have to happen in a certain order in a purchase.
Another example, if there's a box with newspapers on the street that says 'Free', that is legally an offer, and I can accept it by taking one, thus purchasing the newspaper. There's no way to even consider doing that via contract law.
I tell you that, if you cut my lawn tomorrow, I'll pay you $200. You come and cut my lawn tomorrow. I pay you $50. You then file in small claims court for--wait for it--breach of contract. And likely get both your $150 and some additional punitive monies.
That's not magically appearing out of thin air, that's a normal oral contract. I didn't mean you couldn't consent to an already existing contract with actions, of course you can.
If you had appeared on his lawn one morning with a lawn mower sans any other contact with him, and he said 'Be sure to get the back', and you'd never agreed to any contract, you'd be screwed.
(Yes, the police can arrest you for stealing gas. And if the DA can't utterly convince 12 folk that the grainy photo was definitly you, you won't go to jail for it. But even if you beat the DA's rap, the gas store owner can still sue you in a civil action to recover their lost income from your underpayment.)
Ah, but they can't arrest you for failing to cut someone's lawn, or failing to pay the person afterwards. Or if you buy a car and fail to make payments. That's a civil contract violation, failure to fulfil some form of a contract.
Whereas failure to pay for a purchase and walking off with the goods is a form of theft, either theft by taking or theft by conversion.
Contracts are promises for the future. They say 'If you do X, I will do Y'. And only the courts can decided when you failed to do X.
Purchases are exactly what they sound like, an exchange of this money, right here, for these goods, right here. They are finished the moment the agreement is reached, and from then on the ownership of the property is switched.
Contracts and purchases are very similiar concepts, and it's actually pretty obvious that contracts, way back in history, evolved from purchases, but they are not the same thing. If people want to consider purchases 'implicit contracts', it actually works somewhat okay, but they aren't in actual fact.
If purchases were contracts, I could let someone ring something up on a register, and then walk out without paying, because that created 'a contract' to pay, and no one ever specificed when. (And a sane civil court would probably, sans any specific payment date, allow at least until the end of the day to pay, as almost no contract specifies any exact payment time besides 12:01.)
And, no, I'm not a member of the bar, but I did have one explain this to me.
What you had was an oral contract, which is just fine, although a bit dangerous for all concerned. It's not the same as a purchase.
If you had had business cards that say '10 dollars an hour' and he had walked up out of the blue and said 'Do this work for me', without discussing any sort of price, I'm afraid the business cards don't make some sort of magical contract. If you don't discuss a fee, you are doing it for free.
Whereas if you walk into a restaurant and order food without looking at the menu, you don't have a contract, you have finished a purchase, and you are required to pay the money that is now theirs. It's a completely differnet area of law.
Pumping gas is consuming a product offered for sale. If you fail to pay for it, it's not a contract violation, it's theft by conversion. The police cannot arrest you for contract violations, and they sure as hell can do so for stealing gas.
I wish people who don't know anything about contract law would shut up about it. There is no such thing as 'magical invisible contracts that apply when you do something'. Contracts do not work that way.
When you pump gas, you accept the offer made to provide gas at that price. That. Is. Not. A. Contract. It is an offer made and acceptance of the offer, aka, a perfectly normal purchase.
It works exactly like every other purchase works, except you consume the goods to indicate acceptance of the offer, instead of handing them money to indicate acceptance of the offer.
And, just so we're clear, an 'offer' has nothing whatsoever to do with a 'contract'. The only way to agree to a contract is to agree to a contract, you can't do it via any random action.
I don't think it makes sense to hire 'developers' unless they have specific important skills.
I think what makes more sense is bounties.
Actually, what makes more sense would be cleverly purchasing a few important software patents and licensing them to OSS only, with cross-licensing available to companies that cross-license with OSS.
Well, no one is saying they have to charge the price of a book. Just like now, they can charge what it costs to replace the book, which is not the bookstore price at all, but a few dollars more.
OTOH, does anyone find it sad that there are so many people who do not have easy access to bookstores? I am one of these people...the nearest real bookstore is 40 miles away. I think maybe libraries should start offering bookstore services.
You want to buy a book on the shelf? Give us X dollars and we'll order another copy for you. Understand it will come in with the next shipment of books, which could take a month or so, and you'll have to pay in advance. And understand you'll have to come in and present your card and ask for it.
In fact, nothing says you can't do both. Check out most books using your normal card, and check out 'dangerous' books using your anonymous card.
And I'd make this system disposible. Forget 'cards'. Let people walk up, give them X dollars and get a book, print up a receipt with the amount and a code on it, and let them walk back in with the receipt once the book is in and exchange it for money.
Think of it as a new card issued for each book. If you want, you can do this with 'temp cards', where the receipts look like library cards...but it should be one per book, and you should have to turn them back in to get your money back. (To be reset and reused.)
This disallows any sort of anonymous tracking. Otherwise, you could track the account as stuff went in and out, even if you didn't know who it was.
And to make it more secure, once you turn back in a book, all your record should say is 'This receipt now has a balance of X dollars', with no indication of what book used to be checked out.
I'd say let them use the book by itself, but then you'd have to return it in person and stand there while they check it in.
This way, to track you, they'd have to subvert the system prior to you turning the book back in, to learn what account it goes with, and then stand around in the library monitoring the system waiting for you to show up in person and recover your cash.
No, I meant, there have this nice RunAs dialog that lets you specify what user to run as...and doesn't let you specify parameters.
Really on the ball there, Microsoft. I'm sure the best way to run something with parameters is copy the path of the executable to the clipboard and paste it into the 'Run' box.
Oh, wait. You don't give me a way to copy the fucking path to the clipboard from explorer, either.
I'll just open a DOX box and type the...no, wait, I can't open a dos box in a certain directory. I'' just type 'cd' and paste the path of the directory...wait, damn.
Um, I guess I'm supposed to...make a shortcut, and then edit the properties? Yeah, that sounds like a good use of my time. Right drag, make shortcut, right click, properties, change tabs, type '/s', Ok, double click.
Thank you for your easy to use OS, Microsoft.
(Yes, I know there are third party tools to copy the path, and open a dos box in a certain place. That's not really the point.)
Yes, the only place to copyright is ever infringed is P2P.
There is no massive commercial worldwide network of multi-terabyte servers where you can can download anything you want. No sirree.
And there certainly aren't any error recovery tools that have been developed for this hypothetical network, that have, in the last five years, solved all the previous complaints about dropped posts and incomplete binaries.
There's nowhere you can search for binaries and download a file to import into hypothetical clients for this hypothetical network, instead of having to update indexes.
And there aren't providers who decode binaries and provide direct downloads to copyright infringing material via HTTP. And provide services on ports besides 119 to get around ISP blocks.
Not that the network exists in the first place. The only place you can get stuff is shitty P2P networks with spyware-ladden clients and blocked ports. There is no Usenet^Wnetwork like this.
Slashdot Mirror
No they are NOT. That is, in fact, the problem.
And they can't do that, because standarized tests rule the education system in the US.
If their students are bright and creative individuals who make, to make up a number, 145 on a certain test because they know how to do some meta-version of the problem, and have to figure out how the rules apply to that, and some other school makes 150 because their students know exactly what keys to punch into a calculator...the second school wins. The first school gets punished.
But next year, the second school could get some learning disabled students and make a 140, so it's all fair.
That's not a joke, that happened at my school system, luckily after I had left. A family with like eight adopted special needs children moved in, so funding dropped because the school did worse on its tests. Yup...more handicapped people means you need less funding. (Yes, the school did get more special education funds to handle the kids, but it was less than the funding drop.)
Of course, when they left, our test scores rocketed!
Now, it's possible you aren't in the US, and what you say is exactly true. It's no in the US, it's about the opposite of true.
If you want to know what's wrong with the schools, talk to a teacher...they know, and they've known for a while. Feel free to disregard complaints about low pay and teach accreditation...they're right on these things, but it could indeed be biased. Ask them instead about tying funding to test scores.
However, I think these were the state's calculators, and they passed them out at tests and took them back at the end.
You could always just stab though the key with a screwdriver, though. ;)
In fact, due to the inability to type in factions in HTML, and order of operations, you can actually add it as is without any fractions. You just press the division key for /.
Or is HP providing a calculator without a division key now?
What you mean is the calculator wouldn't convert the result to a fraction.
Education is, at this point, seriously fucked up. Not due to the teachers, but due to 'standards' and testing.
We're not teaching people how to 'convert fractions to decimals'. In fact, there is no such skill...that's just division.
And 'converting decimals to fractions' is just reducing fractions, except the denominator is always a multiple of 10.
Why do we care about that? Why are we pretending that's a skill? Because it's on the standarized tests.
So schools are completely unable to link concepts together, because that's not on the tests, so students have, for the last few decades, been memorizing steps in math, as if that teaching you something.
And then calculators came along to do the steps isntantly, thus explosing how inane the entire system was. Solution? Ban calculators, or cripple them or have vehement debates about them.
I'm for giving children calculators at all ages under every circumstances. Why? Because maybe they'll be able to figure out rules on their own, because the school sure as hell won't teach them.
The only time I can see an exception is the first grade 'memorize your addition tables' tests and so forth, but I think that's a fairly idiotic thing anyway. If they have to keep using something, they will memorize it eventually.
And just on general principles, I don't think we should pretend the world works differently than it does. Not only because we are trying to prepare students for the actual world, where they have calculators, but because this really pisses students off who are old enough to understand what's going on, and a large part of the failure of schools is them doing things that students see are completely bogus.
Sadly, all they care about normally is the fucking football team.
However, there will almost immediately be a VMWare designed to run OS X.
VMWare just need to change out their FakeNetworkCard to MacFakeNetworkCard, etc for every piece of hardware, and, presto, OS X on a standard PC.
As a bonus, if Windows supports the Mac hardware, they can drop their original FakeNetworkCard.
I thought everyone knew that.
It's some people calling a trillion a billion, or a thousand million a billion, that (was) the problem. No one's ever had a problem with a million.
But that's okay, you go back to Gilgamesh and Macbeth, and we'll read stories about superhereos and magic.
And if you didn't get that joke there's no hope for you.
(I ignored Einstein because no one in the universe applies literary criticism to scientific papers, you clod.)
That's his mutant powers, rapid healing and bone claws.
However, the amount of alcohol in your breath is also dependant on the amount of alcohol in your stomach, and your mounth.
How much alcohol is in your mouth and stomach at any point is dependent on how your digestion system works.
If the operation of the breathalyzer has been deemed relevant, can't they just get the court to order company officials to show up and testify?
Forget all this screwing around with the state government and getting information from them...if your device says I am guilty, I have a right to question you in court as to how the device works.
Of course, it doesn't matter, as they are being let off...but that raises the question of why the prosecution isn't subpoening the company officials.
A large percent of the time, the blood test will show you a BAC that's .03% or .04% lower.
Why? Because breathalyzers are guessing. For one thing, your BAC is due to your mass, which the breathalyzer has absolutely no way to tell. And how fast you digest alcohol, which, again, it can't tell.
This is in addition to the fact they can't even do what they pretend to do, figure out how much alcohol you consumed. (Which has almost no relation to your BAC.) How much alcohol you exhale is due to how your stomach and throat works, it's not a constant.
Breathalyzers are the stupidest concept, ever. No one should ever be convicted based on them. They're useful for proving 'I smell alcohol on his breath, so I demanded he take a blood test', but they shouldn't be used for anything else.
And one reasonable person who sees a cop and drops down from 10 over to 5 mph below the speed limit because they don't want a ticket is even more likely to cause a pileup.
A contract requires four things--an Offer, Acceptance of that Offer, Consideration on both sides (i.e., something of value from each side to the other), and a Legal Purpose.
A purchase requires an Offer made and Acceptance of that Offer. (Without consideration on both sides it's called a 'gift', but is otherwise the same thing.)
A contract merely requires Consideration on both sides and Acceptence of the contract by both sides. No 'offer', although for some reason people often try to assert so. An offer is made by one side, whereas a contract is made by two.
Think of the difference this way: In a contract, both sides agree independently. It is written out, and signed in a random order. If I sign, and then change my mind before you sign, I'm screwed. You can still sign and make it a valid contract.
OTOH, if I go the store, and the cashier offers me a price of $100 dollars, and then realizes I'm the guy who shoplifted last week, he can withdraw the offer if I have yet to pay.
That's just the most blatant difference, because things have to happen in a certain order in a purchase.
Another example, if there's a box with newspapers on the street that says 'Free', that is legally an offer, and I can accept it by taking one, thus purchasing the newspaper. There's no way to even consider doing that via contract law.
I tell you that, if you cut my lawn tomorrow, I'll pay you $200. You come and cut my lawn tomorrow. I pay you $50. You then file in small claims court for--wait for it--breach of contract. And likely get both your $150 and some additional punitive monies.
That's not magically appearing out of thin air, that's a normal oral contract. I didn't mean you couldn't consent to an already existing contract with actions, of course you can.
If you had appeared on his lawn one morning with a lawn mower sans any other contact with him, and he said 'Be sure to get the back', and you'd never agreed to any contract, you'd be screwed.
(Yes, the police can arrest you for stealing gas. And if the DA can't utterly convince 12 folk that the grainy photo was definitly you, you won't go to jail for it. But even if you beat the DA's rap, the gas store owner can still sue you in a civil action to recover their lost income from your underpayment.)
Ah, but they can't arrest you for failing to cut someone's lawn, or failing to pay the person afterwards. Or if you buy a car and fail to make payments. That's a civil contract violation, failure to fulfil some form of a contract.
Whereas failure to pay for a purchase and walking off with the goods is a form of theft, either theft by taking or theft by conversion.
Contracts are promises for the future. They say 'If you do X, I will do Y'. And only the courts can decided when you failed to do X.
Purchases are exactly what they sound like, an exchange of this money, right here, for these goods, right here. They are finished the moment the agreement is reached, and from then on the ownership of the property is switched.
Contracts and purchases are very similiar concepts, and it's actually pretty obvious that contracts, way back in history, evolved from purchases, but they are not the same thing. If people want to consider purchases 'implicit contracts', it actually works somewhat okay, but they aren't in actual fact.
If purchases were contracts, I could let someone ring something up on a register, and then walk out without paying, because that created 'a contract' to pay, and no one ever specificed when. (And a sane civil court would probably, sans any specific payment date, allow at least until the end of the day to pay, as almost no contract specifies any exact payment time besides 12:01.)
And, no, I'm not a member of the bar, but I did have one explain this to me.
If you had had business cards that say '10 dollars an hour' and he had walked up out of the blue and said 'Do this work for me', without discussing any sort of price, I'm afraid the business cards don't make some sort of magical contract. If you don't discuss a fee, you are doing it for free.
Whereas if you walk into a restaurant and order food without looking at the menu, you don't have a contract, you have finished a purchase, and you are required to pay the money that is now theirs. It's a completely differnet area of law.
Pumping gas is consuming a product offered for sale. If you fail to pay for it, it's not a contract violation, it's theft by conversion. The police cannot arrest you for contract violations, and they sure as hell can do so for stealing gas.
I wish people who don't know anything about contract law would shut up about it. There is no such thing as 'magical invisible contracts that apply when you do something'. Contracts do not work that way.
When you pump gas, you accept the offer made to provide gas at that price. That. Is. Not. A. Contract. It is an offer made and acceptance of the offer, aka, a perfectly normal purchase.
It works exactly like every other purchase works, except you consume the goods to indicate acceptance of the offer, instead of handing them money to indicate acceptance of the offer.
And, just so we're clear, an 'offer' has nothing whatsoever to do with a 'contract'. The only way to agree to a contract is to agree to a contract, you can't do it via any random action.
The ideal solution is, of course, to not have any patents, and maybe if MS can't use them against us, maybe they'll come out against them.
I don't know what useful patents could be gotten for $150,000. Probably one from someone partial to open source.
I think what makes more sense is bounties.
Actually, what makes more sense would be cleverly purchasing a few important software patents and licensing them to OSS only, with cross-licensing available to companies that cross-license with OSS.
I can't imagine why they'd suddenly start loaning based on the price.
OTOH, does anyone find it sad that there are so many people who do not have easy access to bookstores? I am one of these people...the nearest real bookstore is 40 miles away. I think maybe libraries should start offering bookstore services.
You want to buy a book on the shelf? Give us X dollars and we'll order another copy for you. Understand it will come in with the next shipment of books, which could take a month or so, and you'll have to pay in advance. And understand you'll have to come in and present your card and ask for it.
And I'd make this system disposible. Forget 'cards'. Let people walk up, give them X dollars and get a book, print up a receipt with the amount and a code on it, and let them walk back in with the receipt once the book is in and exchange it for money.
Think of it as a new card issued for each book. If you want, you can do this with 'temp cards', where the receipts look like library cards...but it should be one per book, and you should have to turn them back in to get your money back. (To be reset and reused.)
This disallows any sort of anonymous tracking. Otherwise, you could track the account as stuff went in and out, even if you didn't know who it was.
And to make it more secure, once you turn back in a book, all your record should say is 'This receipt now has a balance of X dollars', with no indication of what book used to be checked out.
I'd say let them use the book by itself, but then you'd have to return it in person and stand there while they check it in.
This way, to track you, they'd have to subvert the system prior to you turning the book back in, to learn what account it goes with, and then stand around in the library monitoring the system waiting for you to show up in person and recover your cash.
Really on the ball there, Microsoft. I'm sure the best way to run something with parameters is copy the path of the executable to the clipboard and paste it into the 'Run' box.
Oh, wait. You don't give me a way to copy the fucking path to the clipboard from explorer, either.
I'll just open a DOX box and type the...no, wait, I can't open a dos box in a certain directory. I'' just type 'cd' and paste the path of the directory...wait, damn.
Um, I guess I'm supposed to...make a shortcut, and then edit the properties? Yeah, that sounds like a good use of my time. Right drag, make shortcut, right click, properties, change tabs, type ' /s', Ok, double click.
Thank you for your easy to use OS, Microsoft.
(Yes, I know there are third party tools to copy the path, and open a dos box in a certain place. That's not really the point.)
And why the fuck doesn't 'run as' allow you to specify parameters?
There is no massive commercial worldwide network of multi-terabyte servers where you can can download anything you want. No sirree.
And there certainly aren't any error recovery tools that have been developed for this hypothetical network, that have, in the last five years, solved all the previous complaints about dropped posts and incomplete binaries.
There's nowhere you can search for binaries and download a file to import into hypothetical clients for this hypothetical network, instead of having to update indexes.
And there aren't providers who decode binaries and provide direct downloads to copyright infringing material via HTTP. And provide services on ports besides 119 to get around ISP blocks.
Not that the network exists in the first place. The only place you can get stuff is shitty P2P networks with spyware-ladden clients and blocked ports. There is no Usenet^Wnetwork like this.