Well, if a few million people were still working here in the US there would be a much larger consumer pool from which to draw.
Off shoring labor is so self-defeating it's not funny. Your country's corporations exports million of jobs, and millions of its citizens no longer have jobs. Those jobless people can no longer can purchase those "cheap" products manufactured overseas, and force down labor costs overall as they are desperate for work. Send enough jobs over seas and pretty soon the marketplace dries up for all corporations, no matter how "cheap" the offshored products are. The economy will completely tank due to lack of money circulating as consumers will have little to no disposable income due to smaller wages, and because the consumer pool has shrunk in size by several millions of individuals.
Off shoring labor is basically cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Hmmm.... MS would be screwing over the machine owner by actually letting them know that their machine has been compromised by having it blue screen? How is that?
It's somehow NOT screwing over the user to let them go on in ignorance doing their banking, tax prep, online investing, online purchasing, etc... from a compromised machine? How do you figure that? You would rather let an attacker know all your personal information, and have your machine used to compromise other systems, than have your machine blue screen? If you would, I say you have some seriously screwed up priorities.
Why be afraid of losing karma? Are you that big of chicken? Be an adult, and own up to what you believe. Don't let the "shame game" that's being played in politics these days keep you from being who you are.
Let's see. You have a PHD and you don't have a chance of understanding that an ARM mortgage will bite you in the ass financially when interest rates rise, if you're left to your own devices. I have a high school education plus 2 years of technical school, and I call recognizing what an ARM can do to you "obvious" as it's common sense.
No wonder people with your level of education are often referred to as "educated idiots". I'll bet you're a liberal or progressive and think debt can do our country no real economic harm, and that the government can spend us out of a depression too.
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If that's what your entire point was, why not just say this originally? Why play the game of conflating parallel installs with single instances of combined releases?
Your game playing makes me doubt your veracity.
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Also, you can run as many different versions as you want - just point the upgrader/installer to the right mount points in each case. IOW, you can have 11.2 running on one or more partitions, a second copy on another set of partitions, a common home, a common swap, a few other distros on yet other partitions, no problem - but then again, I haven't seen a disto where that would be a problem, so debian is nothing special in that respect.
So, did you upgrade from 10.x to 11.x by just pointing to the new repositories? That would be an equivalent to apt's capability. I've done the equivalent multiple times with the same installation. The SuSe equivalent to what Debian can do would be upgrading from 9.x, to 10.x, to 11.x. by just pointing yum to the new repositories.
You're basically comparing apples and oranges with your other claims. What you're saying is that you can boot into one of three parallel SuSe installations that share common/home and/swap partitions. To change versions of the OS you have to reboot.
That's supposed to be special? I can do the same (parallel installations with common/home and/swap partitions) with Debian, or any other distro, but that's not what I'm referring to. The SuSe equivalent of what I'm referring to would be to combine 10.2, 10.3, and 11.0 into the same partition and boot into a single instance that contains a mix of all three. That is what apt is capable of, and yum is not.
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One more piece of info. My first Debian installation started with Woody. I dist-upgraded it to Sarge. I later dist-upgraded Sarge to testing(Etch before its release), and after that used apt-pinning to run a combination of Sarge, Etch, and Sid at the same time. When Etch came out I dist-upgraded to it while continuing to use apt-pinning.
I finally moved to a straight Sid install for about a year. I ran that same installation for 4.5 years without a format and during that time upgraded releases, or ran combinations of releases, at least 6 times without a problem. A power spike finally killed the hard drive and forced me to do a clean install.
Let's see you upgrade your versions of SuSe 4 or 5 times without formatting, and run combinations of different SuSe releases at the same time. I don't think you'll be able to do it, but if you can, then I'll believe yum has finally become the equivalent of the apt system.
But, in the end, who cares? It's good that we have choices, and no two people are going to like the same things for the same reasons all the time. You be happy with SuSe and I'll be happy with Debian. We've both found something we really like, and that's what really counts.
Re:your first sentence is technically flawed
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I've got 25 repositories enabled, and they're all on-line. Do a basic install off the dvd, then enable the online repositories and install everything else from there.
Why should I have to do all that? All I need to do a network installation is choose any one of the listed repositories in the installer routine, and SuSe lists none of their repositories in their installer, and a network install just works.
I've also done a lot of Debian installs, and install multiple DE's such as KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, FVWM, etc... on my installs without a problem. Right now my main desktop has more than 360,000 files reported by apt as being installed. I've never had a single software conflict problem that I didn't cause myself through over-riding either apt or dpkg.
Oh, and all my hardware works out of the box, including wireless.
So what cpu and motherboard are you running on? It can't be Intel or ARM or AMD
And which of these companies claim to be devoted to open source? Not a one. Novell has made the claim, made their deal with the devil anyway, and in so doing have given MS FUD more weight. Conflating hardware companies that do support Linux to some extent by providing drivers for their own hardware, and make very few claims beyond that, with a company claiming to be very supportive of open source is a mistake as far as I'm concerned. It's comparing apples and oranges.
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Why would I run OpenSuse when I can, and do, run Debian?
Apt is a far better package manager and it's never left me in the lurch. OpenSuSe 10.2, and yum, left me with major software conflicts in a clean installation. It took me quite a while to figure out how to fix it. Granted, I wasn't all that familiar with yum, and if I was it wouldn't have taken me as long, but there is no way a clean installation should ever result in major software conflicts. When they are bad enough that running updates is impossible without knowledge of advanced yum capabilities, then there are major problems with the distro, at least in my opinion.
Plus, yum's network installation routine is very amateurish. You have to know which repositories to use or your installation fails, and which repositories support network installations is anything but obvious. What's up with that? Pick any Debian, or Ubuntu, repository and network installs just work. No special anything to choose. No outside knowledge required. If you can install Debian from a cd/dvd, you can use the network installer.
Lastly, Novell, and by association all versions of SuSe, lost my support when they made deals with the devil.
Re:your first sentence is technically flawed
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As for home users - hell, no! You needed to be a real nerd to do anything with any Unix until at least 2007.
I think this is a huge distortion of reality. I had never had my own computer, or really even used one, until 2000. ( I was then in my mid 40s.) By early 2003 I was playing with RedHat and Mandrake in a dual-boot situation, and by early 2004 Debian was my full-time OS. I "get" computers to some degree, obviously, but there are a lot of people far more talented in this area than I am.
I think it's just that the vast majority of Windows people think that the way MS does things is the only way computers should run, and that's what confuses them as they never get past that point, even though in many ways a Windows OS is very non-intuitive, and the *nixes, along with Linux, are far more logical in how they are set up. I say that because once I started to learn Linux it made far more sense to me than Windows ever did, and moving to a BSD was only a small step away from Linux when compared to the size of the jump from Windows to Linux.
I also see my view of the differences between Linux and Windows verified by quite a few other people when they've spent some time with Linux after having been strictly Windows people for quite a while. Their opinion of Linux goes from, "Oh, this is hard." to "Once you start to learn this it's really cool." in a few months.
Re:your first sentence is technically flawed
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Even at ten cents, Ubuntu is overpriced because it's just so fugly-ugly, even with the "new look."
Wow. What a way to evaluate software. If you like the eye candy, the software is good. If you don't like the eye candy, the software is bad. That's quite a way to evaluate the value of software. Looks is of greater value than security, performance, price, stability, etc....
For the life of me, though, I still can't figure out why, if your criteria for choosing an OS really is looks, you would run Windows. I like the looks of my Debian installs much more than I like the looks of Windows. Plus, I can add far more eye candy to Debian than you can to Windows, and run it on cheaper hardware than Windows will require, while getting the same level of performance.
I run Postgresql and Apache on my laptop(single core Turion, 1 gig of ram, 4200 rpm drives, ATI Radeon 200M ) so I can build databases and web apps. Plus I run a few Compiz eye candy effects, and my 6 year old laptop still has acceptable performance. I don't think, although I haven't run a Windows OS for several years, you would get the same performance out of a modern Windows server running eye candy, IIS, and SqlServer that I get out of Debian on this old of hardware.
It's innovations like that which will solve the systemic problems in our school system as it addresses the underlying problems without throwing money at the problem.
I will have to disagree with you once again as I believe you're missing the obvious.
Dismissing our school system of the past just because we were an agrarian economy misses the fact that the same school system powered our industrial revolution. What might seem as simple to us today, as it is now common, was state-of-the-art in its day and just as revolutionary as improvements today, if not more revolutionary as there wasn't a known base to build on. Those men worked in entirely unknown territory.
The same school system that educated "those farmers" also educated the engineers, businessmen, etc... that advanced the multiple technologies used that built our economic and military power in this country. Those old schools educated the men who first conceived of computers. If not for those inventors and creators we wouldn't be where we are, technologically, today.
As I said, the problem isn't money. The problems lie elsewhere.
I really like that you show your kids the applicability to real life of their studies. I wish I would have had math teachers like you. I had good teachers, for the most part, but math always left cold as beyond basic math I never understood how it was used.
As to some highly motivated students getting D's, in some classes, I don't see that as a big deal. If they're getting those grades in all academic classes maybe they would be better fitted to a vocational school. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that as we're all wired to be better in some areas of endeavor than in others.
I went to school with three guys who almost flunked out of high school as academics weren't their cup of tea, but when they started working with their hands, wow, were they skilled. One was a genius as a machinist. You tell him what you wanted and he'd make it. The other was a genius as a finish carpenter. He could figure out the compound miter cuts required to make a spiral curl in a wooden hand rail in his head and have them come out perfectly. Within a year after starting the job he was better at it then those around him who had been doing that work for 30 years. The last became a gemologist. A very good one.
My older brother got D's in high school chemistry, and he was motivated to study. He became an accountant and project manager after he got out of school, He just didn't grok chemistry. I knew a successful programmer who couldn't fix a clogged drain or use any hand tool with any degree of skill. I also know a few successful businessmen who couldn't program a digital thermostat if their life depended on it.
We can't make programmers out of natural musicians or accountants out of instinctive carpenters or machinists. We need to find ways to expose kids to a wide range of things they can do with their lives, and not act disappointed if they want to work with their hands.
Success in life isn't getting rich, it's enjoying what you do and being happy doing it.
Hmmmm.... Are you saying there are currently no self-motivated kids in our school system at all? There sure were in my day. I was always self-motivated to learn, and I wasn't alone. The self-motivated kids that need no encouragement to learn are the minority, but they do exist. Thus, the "most" kids, as someone who is self-motivated doesn't need, or require, external motivation.
Bad teachers have always existed. I had some of them and I went to parochial schools, not public schools. A bad teacher never stopped me from learning. A good teacher inspired me, made me want to study more, but that's beside the point. I learned in spite of them.
If parents can't become a part of motivating their kids, then we're probably sunk. We've become so apathetic, so self-satisfied, so smug, as a society, that many in our society see no need for their kids to learn, to explore, to be curious. Mediocrity is good enough for them. My step-daughter is married to a guy like that. He doesn't encourage his kids to learn anything. He didn't put forth any effort in school, and he sees no need for his kids to learn.
To me the probable solution to disinterested parents has to come from multiple sources. 1. Grandparents need to get involved. 2. Kids need psychological, not monetary, rewards for competing in school that actually mean something to them and will motivate them to want to learn. 3. We need to focus on learning, not political correctness, not politics, and engage them in the learning process. 4. We need to expect much of students, not the least possible. Expect greatness and we will get greatness. Expect mediocrity and we'll get mediocrity. People, especially kids, live up, or down, according to the expectations placed on them.
Where did I say that the government should give a kid money? I, in fact, said just the opposite. Entitlements kill motivation. And, where did I say that giving a kid money is a solution?
All I said that this study proved was that kids who are motivated will learn. Is money the answer? No. It only exacerbates the entitlement problem in the long run. This country had a majority of students who were motivated for a major part of its history. What has changed? What led to those changes?
I believe the problems that the educational system faces are just a symptom of the problems in our society. We have a far larger percentage of our society wanting something for nothing than we ever had. We have a large portion of our kids believing their country "owes" them, not that they owe society something for the privilege of living here. People have always emigrated here from around the globe because in this country they had a chance to improve themselves without interference from the government. That's what made the US attractive to them.
Now we have a considerable portion of our society that thinks it's the government's job to make sure they succeed. We have an educational system that makes kids think that just being in class is an accomplishment, that there is no real need to excel. They get rewarded for doing nothing.
Take a look at Chinese students. They want to learn. They want to excel. They realize that there is competition and that you must compete to succeed. We're teaching our kids exactly the opposite.
I realize what you said about money. But, the money argument is being made throughout the replies to the article, and you basically endorsed the idea that more money is needed.
Our public school system used far fewer monetary resources, had many one-room schools, very few books, etc... for most of our history as a nation. Yet, in spite of the "lack of money" that educational system produced the people who built this country and made it into the economic and military powerhouse that it became.
The above tells me that money, or lack of it, has nothing to do with the problems our educational system is having. The school system having money doesn't motivate student to succeed. School system financing doesn't motivate parents to be involved in their kids education and encourage them learn. Money is a very poor substitute for those things, and without those two things our school system is bound to fail, no matter how much money is spent on it.
Who knows? Maybe you're right. I don't know all the circumstances, but contempt of court seems out of line to me.
I know Kevin Trudeau can be an oily character, but did he actually call for "spamming" the judge, or did he just ask his supporters to email the judge? The first scenario is a much different situation than the second.
I would imagine that Trudeau has a lot of supporters, and my guess is that he didn't really understand what the result of asking people to email the judge would be. I doubt he understood that asking for support would end up being basically a ddos attack on the judge as he's a salesman, not a technical geek.
Money, or lack of it, is no indicator of success, ability to learn, or the quality of a person's education.
One of our nations smartest, most capable political leaders ever came from nothing. He competed with men born to wealth, privilege, and every educational advantage possible. He still succeeded, and those very men with whom he both competed and worked with acknowledged that he really was their intellectual better, and acknowledged him as an outstanding leader. They scoffed at his humble beginnings at the start, but once they came in direct contact with him they, to a man, acknowledged his supremacy and wisdom.
They were men from the best of schools. He was entirely self-taught. He attended no more than 1 full year of formal education.
The man? Abraham Lincoln. If you've never read his speeches you've never really understood his genius. The man could frame an argument like no one else I've ever read. After reading Lincoln's speeches I felt sorry for Stephen Douglas. He never had a chance in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He was squashed like a bug.
Who knew that sufficiently motivated kids could get good grades? What a stunner. It's absolutely mind boggling.
All this study does is point out the obvious. What it doesn't do is show how to teach students how to find reasons within themselves for getting good grades. As lack of self-motivation is the real problem standing between most kids and realizing their personal potential(both grade-wise and in life) that's where the studies should focus.
I remember Algebra class in high school. It wasn't all that hard, but I hated it as no one ever told me what it was good for, and I couldn't visualize any use for it. I ended up dropping it because I would have gotten a D in it, while I pulled straight A's in Geometry with hardly any effort on my part. The difference? My interest level. My internal motivation. I loved pulling out my Geometry book and going to Geometry class. I hated pulling out my Algebra book and going to Algebra class, even though I liked the teacher.
A decade later I entered a college technical course which required algebra skills for the electrical theory it taught. I aced both math and electrical courses as I finally finally saw what algebra was used for, and became motivated as I found electrical theory fascinating.
In my late 40s I went back to school again and aced math classes related to electronics that the college said I had no business even taking with my math background. Those classes combined algebra and trig, which I'd never studied at any level in school, but yet I breezed through them with minimal effort. My total exposure to trig before those classes? A small, and I mean small, trig textbook written in the late 1800s. It was approximately 4"x6" and about.5" thick, including the hard cover that I had spent maybe 4 or 5 hours total reading, but it made sense to me
We need to study how to motivate, how to get kids to understand how the skills taught in school will affect their life after school. Once they understand those things they will apply themselves as it's in their own best interest and they will recognize it. They aren't stupid, they're just taught more about political correctness, and that the world owes them, in school these days than they are about real life, how they can succeed, and what that success will mean to them in quality of life after school.
This study shows short-term motivation works. But what we really need is to understand how to encourage long-term motivation in our kids. Teaching them that they are entitled to the government taking care of them from the cradle to the grave isn't motivational in the least. It's demotivational, if that's actually a word. It teaches them that they can get by with the least effort possible, and that's a recipe for disaster-in-the-making for our country's long-term future. Why? If our kids aren't self-motivated to succeed, our country will fail right along with them.
A judge is going to take phone calls or read/answer email while he is presiding_at_trial/court_is_in_session? I would most sincerely hope not. I would say it is his duty to do none of those things, but to keep his attention fully on the proceedings in the courtroom, and that if something worthy of interrupting his attention does come, it comes via court clerk or someone like that. Thus, his computer in his chambers is a completely viable alternative to accessing email via his blackberry, and his office phone a viable alternative also, while he is presiding.
That's why I can't see this as legitimately being an interruption of the court. This is a judge's over-reaction to something that's a nuisance outside of the trial and outside of actually presiding at court. Whether he has the power to punish someone because he was mad is beside the point. All doing that does is show his pettiness.
Yeah, but why was it at a standstill? That's the important part. I believe it was, at least in part, because of lack of heavy water caused by the Allies destruction of their heavy water production facility in Norway.
By 1945 I don't believe that most of the German scientists wanted to work on it as they believed the war was lost and that Hitler was a madman. Was there a centrally administered program? No, but that doesn't mean there wasn't some success in one or two of their projeccts. Plus, there are eyewitness accounts of events that only make sense if you know what a nuclear explosion looks like, and what the after-effects are to someone relatively near that explosion.
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Well, if a few million people were still working here in the US there would be a much larger consumer pool from which to draw.
Off shoring labor is so self-defeating it's not funny. Your country's corporations exports million of jobs, and millions of its citizens no longer have jobs. Those jobless people can no longer can purchase those "cheap" products manufactured overseas, and force down labor costs overall as they are desperate for work. Send enough jobs over seas and pretty soon the marketplace dries up for all corporations, no matter how "cheap" the offshored products are. The economy will completely tank due to lack of money circulating as consumers will have little to no disposable income due to smaller wages, and because the consumer pool has shrunk in size by several millions of individuals.
Off shoring labor is basically cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Hmmm.... MS would be screwing over the machine owner by actually letting them know that their machine has been compromised by having it blue screen? How is that?
It's somehow NOT screwing over the user to let them go on in ignorance doing their banking, tax prep, online investing, online purchasing, etc... from a compromised machine? How do you figure that? You would rather let an attacker know all your personal information, and have your machine used to compromise other systems, than have your machine blue screen? If you would, I say you have some seriously screwed up priorities.
Why be afraid of losing karma? Are you that big of chicken? Be an adult, and own up to what you believe. Don't let the "shame game" that's being played in politics these days keep you from being who you are.
Let's see. You have a PHD and you don't have a chance of understanding that an ARM mortgage will bite you in the ass financially when interest rates rise, if you're left to your own devices. I have a high school education plus 2 years of technical school, and I call recognizing what an ARM can do to you "obvious" as it's common sense.
No wonder people with your level of education are often referred to as "educated idiots". I'll bet you're a liberal or progressive and think debt can do our country no real economic harm, and that the government can spend us out of a depression too.
If that's what your entire point was, why not just say this originally? Why play the game of conflating parallel installs with single instances of combined releases?
Your game playing makes me doubt your veracity.
Also, you can run as many different versions as you want - just point the upgrader/installer to the right mount points in each case. IOW, you can have 11.2 running on one or more partitions, a second copy on another set of partitions, a common home, a common swap, a few other distros on yet other partitions, no problem - but then again, I haven't seen a disto where that would be a problem, so debian is nothing special in that respect.
So, did you upgrade from 10.x to 11.x by just pointing to the new repositories? That would be an equivalent to apt's capability. I've done the equivalent multiple times with the same installation. The SuSe equivalent to what Debian can do would be upgrading from 9.x, to 10.x, to 11.x. by just pointing yum to the new repositories.
You're basically comparing apples and oranges with your other claims. What you're saying is that you can boot into one of three parallel SuSe installations that share common /home and /swap partitions. To change versions of the OS you have to reboot.
That's supposed to be special? I can do the same (parallel installations with common /home and /swap partitions) with Debian, or any other distro, but that's not what I'm referring to. The SuSe equivalent of what I'm referring to would be to combine 10.2, 10.3, and 11.0 into the same partition and boot into a single instance that contains a mix of all three. That is what apt is capable of, and yum is not.
On this we are fully agreed.
One more piece of info. My first Debian installation started with Woody. I dist-upgraded it to Sarge. I later dist-upgraded Sarge to testing(Etch before its release), and after that used apt-pinning to run a combination of Sarge, Etch, and Sid at the same time. When Etch came out I dist-upgraded to it while continuing to use apt-pinning.
I finally moved to a straight Sid install for about a year. I ran that same installation for 4.5 years without a format and during that time upgraded releases, or ran combinations of releases, at least 6 times without a problem. A power spike finally killed the hard drive and forced me to do a clean install.
Let's see you upgrade your versions of SuSe 4 or 5 times without formatting, and run combinations of different SuSe releases at the same time. I don't think you'll be able to do it, but if you can, then I'll believe yum has finally become the equivalent of the apt system.
But, in the end, who cares? It's good that we have choices, and no two people are going to like the same things for the same reasons all the time. You be happy with SuSe and I'll be happy with Debian. We've both found something we really like, and that's what really counts.
I've got 25 repositories enabled, and they're all on-line. Do a basic install off the dvd, then enable the online repositories and install everything else from there.
Why should I have to do all that? All I need to do a network installation is choose any one of the listed repositories in the installer routine, and SuSe lists none of their repositories in their installer, and a network install just works.
I've also done a lot of Debian installs, and install multiple DE's such as KDE, Gnome, XFCE, Enlightenment, FVWM, etc... on my installs without a problem. Right now my main desktop has more than 360,000 files reported by apt as being installed. I've never had a single software conflict problem that I didn't cause myself through over-riding either apt or dpkg.
Oh, and all my hardware works out of the box, including wireless.
So what cpu and motherboard are you running on? It can't be Intel or ARM or AMD
And which of these companies claim to be devoted to open source? Not a one. Novell has made the claim, made their deal with the devil anyway, and in so doing have given MS FUD more weight. Conflating hardware companies that do support Linux to some extent by providing drivers for their own hardware, and make very few claims beyond that, with a company claiming to be very supportive of open source is a mistake as far as I'm concerned. It's comparing apples and oranges.
Why would I run OpenSuse when I can, and do, run Debian?
Apt is a far better package manager and it's never left me in the lurch. OpenSuSe 10.2, and yum, left me with major software conflicts in a clean installation. It took me quite a while to figure out how to fix it. Granted, I wasn't all that familiar with yum, and if I was it wouldn't have taken me as long, but there is no way a clean installation should ever result in major software conflicts. When they are bad enough that running updates is impossible without knowledge of advanced yum capabilities, then there are major problems with the distro, at least in my opinion.
Plus, yum's network installation routine is very amateurish. You have to know which repositories to use or your installation fails, and which repositories support network installations is anything but obvious. What's up with that? Pick any Debian, or Ubuntu, repository and network installs just work. No special anything to choose. No outside knowledge required. If you can install Debian from a cd/dvd, you can use the network installer.
Lastly, Novell, and by association all versions of SuSe, lost my support when they made deals with the devil.
As for home users - hell, no! You needed to be a real nerd to do anything with any Unix until at least 2007.
I think this is a huge distortion of reality. I had never had my own computer, or really even used one, until 2000. ( I was then in my mid 40s.) By early 2003 I was playing with RedHat and Mandrake in a dual-boot situation, and by early 2004 Debian was my full-time OS. I "get" computers to some degree, obviously, but there are a lot of people far more talented in this area than I am.
I think it's just that the vast majority of Windows people think that the way MS does things is the only way computers should run, and that's what confuses them as they never get past that point, even though in many ways a Windows OS is very non-intuitive, and the *nixes, along with Linux, are far more logical in how they are set up. I say that because once I started to learn Linux it made far more sense to me than Windows ever did, and moving to a BSD was only a small step away from Linux when compared to the size of the jump from Windows to Linux.
I also see my view of the differences between Linux and Windows verified by quite a few other people when they've spent some time with Linux after having been strictly Windows people for quite a while. Their opinion of Linux goes from, "Oh, this is hard." to "Once you start to learn this it's really cool." in a few months.
Even at ten cents, Ubuntu is overpriced because it's just so fugly-ugly, even with the "new look."
Wow. What a way to evaluate software. If you like the eye candy, the software is good. If you don't like the eye candy, the software is bad. That's quite a way to evaluate the value of software. Looks is of greater value than security, performance, price, stability, etc....
For the life of me, though, I still can't figure out why, if your criteria for choosing an OS really is looks, you would run Windows. I like the looks of my Debian installs much more than I like the looks of Windows. Plus, I can add far more eye candy to Debian than you can to Windows, and run it on cheaper hardware than Windows will require, while getting the same level of performance.
I run Postgresql and Apache on my laptop(single core Turion, 1 gig of ram, 4200 rpm drives, ATI Radeon 200M ) so I can build databases and web apps. Plus I run a few Compiz eye candy effects, and my 6 year old laptop still has acceptable performance. I don't think, although I haven't run a Windows OS for several years, you would get the same performance out of a modern Windows server running eye candy, IIS, and SqlServer that I get out of Debian on this old of hardware.
It's innovations like that which will solve the systemic problems in our school system as it addresses the underlying problems without throwing money at the problem.
I will have to disagree with you once again as I believe you're missing the obvious.
Dismissing our school system of the past just because we were an agrarian economy misses the fact that the same school system powered our industrial revolution. What might seem as simple to us today, as it is now common, was state-of-the-art in its day and just as revolutionary as improvements today, if not more revolutionary as there wasn't a known base to build on. Those men worked in entirely unknown territory.
The same school system that educated "those farmers" also educated the engineers, businessmen, etc... that advanced the multiple technologies used that built our economic and military power in this country. Those old schools educated the men who first conceived of computers. If not for those inventors and creators we wouldn't be where we are, technologically, today.
As I said, the problem isn't money. The problems lie elsewhere.
I really like that you show your kids the applicability to real life of their studies. I wish I would have had math teachers like you. I had good teachers, for the most part, but math always left cold as beyond basic math I never understood how it was used.
As to some highly motivated students getting D's, in some classes, I don't see that as a big deal. If they're getting those grades in all academic classes maybe they would be better fitted to a vocational school. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that as we're all wired to be better in some areas of endeavor than in others.
I went to school with three guys who almost flunked out of high school as academics weren't their cup of tea, but when they started working with their hands, wow, were they skilled. One was a genius as a machinist. You tell him what you wanted and he'd make it. The other was a genius as a finish carpenter. He could figure out the compound miter cuts required to make a spiral curl in a wooden hand rail in his head and have them come out perfectly. Within a year after starting the job he was better at it then those around him who had been doing that work for 30 years. The last became a gemologist. A very good one.
My older brother got D's in high school chemistry, and he was motivated to study. He became an accountant and project manager after he got out of school, He just didn't grok chemistry. I knew a successful programmer who couldn't fix a clogged drain or use any hand tool with any degree of skill. I also know a few successful businessmen who couldn't program a digital thermostat if their life depended on it.
We can't make programmers out of natural musicians or accountants out of instinctive carpenters or machinists. We need to find ways to expose kids to a wide range of things they can do with their lives, and not act disappointed if they want to work with their hands.
Success in life isn't getting rich, it's enjoying what you do and being happy doing it.
There's no basis for "most."
Hmmmm.... Are you saying there are currently no self-motivated kids in our school system at all? There sure were in my day. I was always self-motivated to learn, and I wasn't alone. The self-motivated kids that need no encouragement to learn are the minority, but they do exist. Thus, the "most" kids, as someone who is self-motivated doesn't need, or require, external motivation.
Bad teachers have always existed. I had some of them and I went to parochial schools, not public schools. A bad teacher never stopped me from learning. A good teacher inspired me, made me want to study more, but that's beside the point. I learned in spite of them.
If parents can't become a part of motivating their kids, then we're probably sunk. We've become so apathetic, so self-satisfied, so smug, as a society, that many in our society see no need for their kids to learn, to explore, to be curious. Mediocrity is good enough for them. My step-daughter is married to a guy like that. He doesn't encourage his kids to learn anything. He didn't put forth any effort in school, and he sees no need for his kids to learn.
To me the probable solution to disinterested parents has to come from multiple sources. 1. Grandparents need to get involved. 2. Kids need psychological, not monetary, rewards for competing in school that actually mean something to them and will motivate them to want to learn. 3. We need to focus on learning, not political correctness, not politics, and engage them in the learning process. 4. We need to expect much of students, not the least possible. Expect greatness and we will get greatness. Expect mediocrity and we'll get mediocrity. People, especially kids, live up, or down, according to the expectations placed on them.
Where did I say that the government should give a kid money? I, in fact, said just the opposite. Entitlements kill motivation. And, where did I say that giving a kid money is a solution?
All I said that this study proved was that kids who are motivated will learn. Is money the answer? No. It only exacerbates the entitlement problem in the long run. This country had a majority of students who were motivated for a major part of its history. What has changed? What led to those changes?
I believe the problems that the educational system faces are just a symptom of the problems in our society. We have a far larger percentage of our society wanting something for nothing than we ever had. We have a large portion of our kids believing their country "owes" them, not that they owe society something for the privilege of living here. People have always emigrated here from around the globe because in this country they had a chance to improve themselves without interference from the government. That's what made the US attractive to them.
Now we have a considerable portion of our society that thinks it's the government's job to make sure they succeed. We have an educational system that makes kids think that just being in class is an accomplishment, that there is no real need to excel. They get rewarded for doing nothing.
Take a look at Chinese students. They want to learn. They want to excel. They realize that there is competition and that you must compete to succeed. We're teaching our kids exactly the opposite.
I realize what you said about money. But, the money argument is being made throughout the replies to the article, and you basically endorsed the idea that more money is needed.
Our public school system used far fewer monetary resources, had many one-room schools, very few books, etc... for most of our history as a nation. Yet, in spite of the "lack of money" that educational system produced the people who built this country and made it into the economic and military powerhouse that it became.
The above tells me that money, or lack of it, has nothing to do with the problems our educational system is having. The school system having money doesn't motivate student to succeed. School system financing doesn't motivate parents to be involved in their kids education and encourage them learn. Money is a very poor substitute for those things, and without those two things our school system is bound to fail, no matter how much money is spent on it.
Who knows? Maybe you're right. I don't know all the circumstances, but contempt of court seems out of line to me.
I know Kevin Trudeau can be an oily character, but did he actually call for "spamming" the judge, or did he just ask his supporters to email the judge? The first scenario is a much different situation than the second.
I would imagine that Trudeau has a lot of supporters, and my guess is that he didn't really understand what the result of asking people to email the judge would be. I doubt he understood that asking for support would end up being basically a ddos attack on the judge as he's a salesman, not a technical geek.
The money argument is a red herring.
Money, or lack of it, is no indicator of success, ability to learn, or the quality of a person's education.
One of our nations smartest, most capable political leaders ever came from nothing. He competed with men born to wealth, privilege, and every educational advantage possible. He still succeeded, and those very men with whom he both competed and worked with acknowledged that he really was their intellectual better, and acknowledged him as an outstanding leader. They scoffed at his humble beginnings at the start, but once they came in direct contact with him they, to a man, acknowledged his supremacy and wisdom.
They were men from the best of schools. He was entirely self-taught. He attended no more than 1 full year of formal education.
The man? Abraham Lincoln. If you've never read his speeches you've never really understood his genius. The man could frame an argument like no one else I've ever read. After reading Lincoln's speeches I felt sorry for Stephen Douglas. He never had a chance in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He was squashed like a bug.
Who knew that sufficiently motivated kids could get good grades? What a stunner. It's absolutely mind boggling.
All this study does is point out the obvious. What it doesn't do is show how to teach students how to find reasons within themselves for getting good grades. As lack of self-motivation is the real problem standing between most kids and realizing their personal potential(both grade-wise and in life) that's where the studies should focus.
I remember Algebra class in high school. It wasn't all that hard, but I hated it as no one ever told me what it was good for, and I couldn't visualize any use for it. I ended up dropping it because I would have gotten a D in it, while I pulled straight A's in Geometry with hardly any effort on my part. The difference? My interest level. My internal motivation. I loved pulling out my Geometry book and going to Geometry class. I hated pulling out my Algebra book and going to Algebra class, even though I liked the teacher.
A decade later I entered a college technical course which required algebra skills for the electrical theory it taught. I aced both math and electrical courses as I finally finally saw what algebra was used for, and became motivated as I found electrical theory fascinating.
In my late 40s I went back to school again and aced math classes related to electronics that the college said I had no business even taking with my math background. Those classes combined algebra and trig, which I'd never studied at any level in school, but yet I breezed through them with minimal effort. My total exposure to trig before those classes? A small, and I mean small, trig textbook written in the late 1800s. It was approximately 4"x6" and about.5" thick, including the hard cover that I had spent maybe 4 or 5 hours total reading, but it made sense to me
We need to study how to motivate, how to get kids to understand how the skills taught in school will affect their life after school. Once they understand those things they will apply themselves as it's in their own best interest and they will recognize it. They aren't stupid, they're just taught more about political correctness, and that the world owes them, in school these days than they are about real life, how they can succeed, and what that success will mean to them in quality of life after school.
This study shows short-term motivation works. But what we really need is to understand how to encourage long-term motivation in our kids. Teaching them that they are entitled to the government taking care of them from the cradle to the grave isn't motivational in the least. It's demotivational, if that's actually a word. It teaches them that they can get by with the least effort possible, and that's a recipe for disaster-in-the-making for our country's long-term future. Why? If our kids aren't self-motivated to succeed, our country will fail right along with them.
I think you missed my point.
A judge is going to take phone calls or read/answer email while he is presiding_at_trial/court_is_in_session? I would most sincerely hope not. I would say it is his duty to do none of those things, but to keep his attention fully on the proceedings in the courtroom, and that if something worthy of interrupting his attention does come, it comes via court clerk or someone like that. Thus, his computer in his chambers is a completely viable alternative to accessing email via his blackberry, and his office phone a viable alternative also, while he is presiding.
That's why I can't see this as legitimately being an interruption of the court. This is a judge's over-reaction to something that's a nuisance outside of the trial and outside of actually presiding at court. Whether he has the power to punish someone because he was mad is beside the point. All doing that does is show his pettiness.
might != right
Yeah, it's correct. It's not a typo. It's MS's internal code for a future release called "When pigs fly".
Yeah, but why was it at a standstill? That's the important part. I believe it was, at least in part, because of lack of heavy water caused by the Allies destruction of their heavy water production facility in Norway.
By 1945 I don't believe that most of the German scientists wanted to work on it as they believed the war was lost and that Hitler was a madman. Was there a centrally administered program? No, but that doesn't mean there wasn't some success in one or two of their projeccts. Plus, there are eyewitness accounts of events that only make sense if you know what a nuclear explosion looks like, and what the after-effects are to someone relatively near that explosion.