That they are labelled "inner city" is irrelevant. I happen to know many elementary school children who test above average; they also lack the basic tools for any meaningful "computer instruction". If these inner city kids are exceptionally well-prepared, the camp might be useful, but I doubt it.
I think I know more than a little about this topic. I serve on the Board of the PTA of my daughter's school. I'm the school's webmaster & give advice on technology issues. I think the kids waste far too much time in their computer lab. But it's not my job to set policy, so I keep my opinions to myself. I'm sure the other board members would very surprised to learn a technophile such as me feels this way. Clifford Stoll's High Tech Heretic expresses exactly how I feel. Here is a nice interview with Stoll.
otherwise congress could do an end-around the constitution by providing money to fund things that are unconstitutional.
What an idea! Congress could overtax the citizens, then offer to return some of that money to the States if the states pass laws they (Congress) want, but are prohibited by the Const. from passing themselves! Stuff like speed limits and school testing. Lucky for us, SCOTUS would see through such a transparant scheme!!!
So just what is new here?
on
Telecosm
·
· Score: 1
This sounds like the usual "glories of the network" story, which goes like this: In the Near Future, new houses will be built with a "data pipe" leading out to the street. The owner will receive a monthly bill from his "computing utility". If he is an incorrigable "hacker", he might own a PC, but otherwise, his house will be filled with "dumb" appliances that connect to the pipe: his refrigerator can order groceries as needed; the water meter requests a plumber when it suspects a leak; and so on. (Actually, the appliances are merely sensors that send "resource_used messages" back to a "home-management daemon".) There will be a station with a keyboard & monitor so he can surf the web or "rent" an application only when he needs it. Overclocked CPUs are submerged in McMurdo Sound; data are stored on hard drives located in Greenland. Of course, privacy will be a concern, but as the network experts at Sun tell us, "privacy is dead". Alas, poor SETI.
The ACLU has been demanding "due process" rights for students for years. They claimed (perhaps correctly) that discipline was unjustly administered, eg, principals expelled some students who fought & let others escape any punishment. Schools have responded by removing all discretion from principals and instituting "no-exception" policies. Now, you may not agree with a particular policy, but you can't complain about a lack of "due process".
I learned Python from the "Internet Programming" book, and I love the lean and mean Python. Because of the recent burst of development, it seems to me that lots of new features are being stuffed into the language. Is my perception correct? Is there a danger that Python will forfeit two of its best features, simplicity and cohesiveness, merely to appease a few complainers?
Film has always been a technical medium. As the whiz-kids have discovered new tricks, the importance of the script, actors, and even the director has diminished. If feel "moved" in your dodecaplex today, it's probably due to THX. Consider: The Matrix builds a fantasy world that many of you seem to confuse with reality. Isn't this what the movie warns against?
If you really want to face reality, stop wasting your money on films. Go to a play.
This revolution is... another revolutionary new technology -- railroads, gold mines, steam engines -- that promised to bring the whole world closer together and unify everyone under one single God."
I think we agree: it can't be done. That's why it is so much harder to write a good sonnet than a C program. There is a whole industry for critics who argue about the worthiness of art. One might be able to find a few books such as The Elements of C Programming which treat the accidental qualities of code, but there is nothing like the "Knuth school" or the "Lazy Functional Movement".
It takes just as much skill to write a program in C as it does to write a good sonnet in English. The end product might be different, but the concept is pretty much the same.
I can write a program, and prove that it is correct. Maybe I don't even have to do the proof myself; people are working on "proof generators". Programs!
I can also write a sonnet to my love. I want to tell her how euphoric I feel when I am near her, and how morose I feel when we are apart. What is the calculus which proves the sonnet describes my feelings? Is there a geometry of the heart to help me with my construction?
The goal of an artist is to create a work which will produce an emotional response from the viewer (auditor, etc.)
The goal of a programmer is create an algorithm which produces certain states in a computer.
Now, one may admire the cleverness of an algorithm, or the soundness of a barn, but this doesn't make either into art.
Abraham Lincoln walked 10 miles to return a book. Assuming it were a 100-page book, I reckon he got about 192 bps.
Somehow, he managed.
Almost all kids today have easy access to a library Abe could only dream about. But how many high school graduates have read a single work of Shakespeare? How many know Euclid's Elements? How many can compose a coherent paragraph? Answer: almost none. That would require real work, and no one wants to do that. Instead, Katz wants to give them an Internet connect so that, I suppose, they can fail faster.
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Let ol' graybeard tell you kiddies about civil disobedience. This is how it works: you announce that you are going to break the law, then you break it. When the cops start cracking heads & throw you in jail, you go peacefully. You don't then sue them for violating your rights. You rely on the moral superiority of your position to win over the majority, who eventually demand that the law be repealed.
When I was in school, we had a principal who could mete out punishment w/o having to recite Miranda rights or have an attorney present. School functioned very well. Because students started suing for "unequal application of the rules", school boards adopted "due process" and "zero-tolerence" policies. So now, reason and judgement are out the window -- we have kids suspended because they have toenail clippers in their backpacks.
The "rule in the Constitution" you seek are Amendments 9 & 10. I suppose the DCMA is wrapped in "commerce clause" mumbo-jumbo, so the courts will probably bless it.
The Founding Fathers knew that a state which could hand out the goodies (social security) could also take them away (DCMA), so they tried to limit its powers. Unfortunately, FDR bullied the Supreme Court into permitting the vast expansion of Fed power that we endure today.
The Constitution strictly limits the law-making power of the Congress. One way the Congress gets around this is to over-tax citizens, then offer to return some money to the states if the states will make the laws that are prohibited to Congress. Will the candidate defend the Constitution by vetoing these bills?
An enum of type "foo" is not interchangeable
with an enum of type "bar" without a cast.
Oh, so it's one of *those* languages.
The work that we've done with attributes -- a
feature used to add typed, extensible
metadata to any object -- is completely
new and innovative. I haven't seen it in
any other programming language
OK, so he's either an idiot or a liar.
And C# is the first language to incorporate
XML comment tags that can be used by the
compiler to generate readable documentation
directly from source code.
This is a *good* thing? I'm just a simple boy,
I like my compilers to compile and my
documentation generator to... generate
documentation.
There is no need for header files, IDL files
(Interface Definition Language), GUIDs and
complicated interfaces.
Wait a minute. MS has been telling me that these
are *good* things. Now I'm confused!
Slashdot Mirror
That they are labelled "inner city" is irrelevant. I happen to know many elementary school children who test above average; they also lack the basic tools for any meaningful "computer instruction". If these inner city kids are exceptionally well-prepared, the camp might be useful, but I doubt it.
Nota bene: When I say they lack the basic tools, I mean the children lack a foundation to which "computer instruction" can be added. It's not their fault; the new method of math instruction doesn't teach them how to think.
I think I know more than a little about this topic. I serve on the Board of the PTA of my daughter's school. I'm the school's webmaster & give advice on technology issues. I think the kids waste far too much time in their computer lab. But it's not my job to set policy, so I keep my opinions to myself. I'm sure the other board members would very surprised to learn a technophile such as me feels this way. Clifford Stoll's High Tech Heretic expresses exactly how I feel. Here is a nice interview with Stoll.
otherwise congress could do an end-around the constitution by providing money to fund things that are unconstitutional.
What an idea! Congress could overtax the citizens, then offer to return some of that money to the States if the states pass laws they (Congress) want, but are prohibited by the Const. from passing themselves! Stuff like speed limits and school testing. Lucky for us, SCOTUS would see through such a transparant scheme!!!
This sounds like the usual "glories of the network" story, which goes like this: In the Near Future, new houses will be built with a "data pipe" leading out to the street. The owner will receive a monthly bill from his "computing utility". If he is an incorrigable "hacker", he might own a PC, but otherwise, his house will be filled with "dumb" appliances that connect to the pipe: his refrigerator can order groceries as needed; the water meter requests a plumber when it suspects a leak; and so on. (Actually, the appliances are merely sensors that send "resource_used messages" back to a "home-management daemon".) There will be a station with a keyboard & monitor so he can surf the web or "rent" an application only when he needs it. Overclocked CPUs are submerged in McMurdo Sound; data are stored on hard drives located in Greenland. Of course, privacy will be a concern, but as the network experts at Sun tell us, "privacy is dead". Alas, poor SETI.
He's still worth $4.99995 BILLION more than me.
In my books, that's not equal.
I know what would happen to him.
He'd turn into a cracker.
The ACLU has been demanding "due process" rights for students for years. They claimed (perhaps correctly) that discipline was unjustly administered, eg, principals expelled some students who fought & let others escape any punishment. Schools have responded by removing all discretion from principals and instituting "no-exception" policies. Now, you may not agree with a particular policy, but you can't complain about a lack of "due process".
I learned Python from the "Internet Programming" book, and I love the lean and mean Python. Because of the recent burst of development, it seems to me that lots of new features are being stuffed into the language. Is my perception correct? Is there a danger that Python will forfeit two of its best features, simplicity and cohesiveness, merely to appease a few complainers?
non of this execrable 'self' gunk that python forces upon you
In Ruby, 'self' is spelled '@'.
Film has always been a technical medium. As the whiz-kids have discovered new tricks, the importance of the script, actors, and even the director has diminished. If feel "moved" in your dodecaplex today, it's probably due to THX. Consider: The Matrix builds a fantasy world that many of you seem to confuse with reality. Isn't this what the movie warns against?
If you really want to face reality, stop wasting your money on films. Go to a play.
Father Mersenne ran a low-bandwidth bulletin board in Paris: scholars sent him papers, he passed them around to other scholars.
What does this mean:
... another revolutionary new technology -- railroads, gold mines, steam engines -- that promised to bring the whole world closer together and unify everyone under one single God."
This revolution is
GOLD MINES????
I think we agree: it can't be done. That's why it is so much harder to write a good sonnet than a C program. There is a whole industry for critics who argue about the worthiness of art. One might be able to find a few books such as The Elements of C Programming which treat the accidental qualities of code, but there is nothing like the "Knuth school" or the "Lazy Functional Movement".
It takes just as much skill to write a program in C as it does to write a good sonnet in English. The end product might be different, but the concept is pretty much the same.
I can write a program, and prove that it is correct. Maybe I don't even have to do the proof myself; people are working on "proof generators". Programs!
I can also write a sonnet to my love. I want to tell her how euphoric I feel when I am near her, and how morose I feel when we are apart. What is the calculus which proves the sonnet describes my feelings? Is there a geometry of the heart to help me with my construction?
Quite different things here.
The goal of an artist is to create a work which will produce an emotional response from the viewer (auditor, etc.)
The goal of a programmer is create an algorithm which produces certain states in a computer.
Now, one may admire the cleverness of an algorithm, or the soundness of a barn, but this doesn't make either into art.
Nope. But...
Exod 22:19 Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.
Abraham Lincoln walked 10 miles to return a book. Assuming it were a 100-page book, I reckon he got about 192 bps.
Somehow, he managed.
Almost all kids today have easy access to a library Abe could only dream about. But how many high school graduates have read a single work of Shakespeare? How many know Euclid's Elements? How many can compose a coherent paragraph? Answer: almost none. That would require real work, and no one wants to do that. Instead, Katz wants to give them an Internet connect so that, I suppose, they can fail faster.
P.S. The study is here
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Which freedoms are you worried about?
I know this: you are free to not enter into contracts with those big bad corporations!
Have you checked your grandfather's ears lately?
<shiver/>
Figure out how to make your :CueCat work with a ballot, and you've got it made!
Potential problem: requiring voters to go to Radio Shack.
Let ol' graybeard tell you kiddies about civil disobedience. This is how it works: you announce that you are going to break the law, then you break it. When the cops start cracking heads & throw you in jail, you go peacefully. You don't then sue them for violating your rights. You rely on the moral superiority of your position to win over the majority, who eventually demand that the law be repealed.
When I was in school, we had a principal who could mete out punishment w/o having to recite Miranda rights or have an attorney present. School functioned very well. Because students started suing for "unequal application of the rules", school boards adopted "due process" and "zero-tolerence" policies. So now, reason and judgement are out the window -- we have kids suspended because they have toenail clippers in their backpacks.
You can send thank-you notes to the ACLU.
The "rule in the Constitution" you seek are Amendments 9 & 10. I suppose the DCMA is wrapped in "commerce clause" mumbo-jumbo, so the courts will probably bless it. The Founding Fathers knew that a state which could hand out the goodies (social security) could also take them away (DCMA), so they tried to limit its powers. Unfortunately, FDR bullied the Supreme Court into permitting the vast expansion of Fed power that we endure today.
The Constitution strictly limits the law-making power of the Congress. One way the Congress gets around this is to over-tax citizens, then offer to return some money to the states if the states will make the laws that are prohibited to Congress. Will the candidate defend the Constitution by vetoing these bills?