I'm glad I'm not the only one that reacted that way.
There are two independent incidents. One broke the contract with the school and the code of conduct, and resuted in suspension. The second was a webpage that put up a line about hiding a shotgun with no suggestion that it was a quotation from a book and--Horror of Horrors!--the police looked into it!
Just what are we supposed to do when we see something like that? Ignore it entirely unless they've shot someone already? The police looked into it, and found no crime. What more can you ask?
I don't know about you, but I always feed my python SOAP when he tries to swallow guests. It's the only way he behaves well enough to not be kept in the tank . . .
> I mean - technically nothing can ever be absolute (we can't be sure
> 1+1==2; we've just observed it throughout all of recorded history)
Oh yes, that's been proved. Take a graduate measure theory course, or maybe even an upper division undergraduate theory course. You start with the notion of a "something"--a scratch, a stick, a whatever, and build from there.
On the other hand, proving that an observed phenomenon actually corresponds to the derived "1" or "2" is another matter, but you can certainly prove 1+1=2 from the ground up . . .
> Consider this. ALL events can theoretically be traced back
> to a specific cause.
Pardon???? That's true in the newtonian universe, but not at lower levels.
At the quantum level, things are fundamentally random, and the "hidden
numbers theory" has long fallen out of fashion.
I don't know enough about thermal processes, but radioactive decay is, in thoery,purely stochastic--there are no causal variables and deviations from the mean number of decay evnts *must* be purely random.
>This is the typical irresponsible.com attitude.
>"We got burnt, so what, we had fun!".
That doesn't seem to be a fair characterization . . .
He seems to be saying that the fact that it didn't work out doesn't mean it was a bad move (or maybe I just want to read it that way . . .:)
A risk has to be evaluated before the chance, not after. If you go in knowing that there's a 60% chance of failure, but the payoff for the 40% chance of success makes it worth it, it was still a good decision if it comes up failure.
Additionally he got valuable experience, perhaps better than if he'd gone elsewhere.
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
A corporation won't even get as far as the author suggests. "Piercing the corporate veil" wipes out the corporation for all purposes, leaving the individual liable for everything. If he followed corporate procedures properly, that would not likely be a concern here. The problem, though, is that working on behalf of a corporation does *not* shiled you from liability for your own actions. Instead, the corporation is *also* liable. in the typical case, employees are not worth suing, and only the corporation is targeted. Here, though, it would be the torts committed by the individial that *are* the focus, and he would still be tartgeted without any additional defense.
>You say "egalitarian agenda" as if it were a bad thing. Do you
>disagree with the second paragraph of the [23]United States
>Declaration of Independence?
Of course not, and that's a read herring. Equality at creation and a level playing field do not suggest that equal outcomes are likely. "Egalitarian agenda" is a bad thing when it is to be brought about by pulling down the high (the lobster effect) rather than bringing up the low.
>First of all, you're basing your argument about "average intelligence"
>on anecdotal evidence from your own life and your brother's life.
I do have a very large sample, enough to go beyond merely anecdotal. If I were to resort to anecdotes, the intelligence drops far lower:)
>Unless your brother teaches statistics, I don't see how his opinion is
>relevant.
He doesn't, but I do. I also have a doctorate in statistics . . . A sample of several hundred is overkill for estimating the population mean.
>I also don't understand the importance of open-door Catholic
>schools to your point, since the average American isn't Catholic and
>doesn't want a Catholic education.
It has nothing to do with Catholicsm. Typically, when the results of Catholic schools are brought up, there is a stock response about their selectivity. However, the nonselective Catholic schools also show better results than the public schools, but we're getting into side issues here. The level of performance in either type of Catholic school, as a group, is above the population mean. The level of a four year college graduate is significantly above the mean. The point is that with experience coming from being in those environments, one is exposed to a biased sample, which will cause overestimation of "average" capabilities. "Typical" abilities in any of these three groups is above "Average."
>You might also want to brush up on
>the First Amendment of the[24] United States Bill of Rights if you do
>indeed believe that private schools are the answer to raising
>intelligence.
Huh??? I'm an attorney and a civil libertarian, quite familiar with the Bill of Rights and its predecessors, both as to legal issues and philosophy. I still don't see what you're getting at.
>I am basing my argument on a social constructionist point of view.
>That is to say, people are mostly the product of their environment.
>Therefore, if the average student in your brother's classes aren't up
>to his standard of intelligence, then something about their
>surroundings is amiss.
That's entirely possible. They had many years of surroundings before getting to him. The point is that from his background, his standards and expertations were unrealistically high.
>In my earlier post, I hypothesized that cynical
>teachers contribute to an anti-learning environment.
I have no doubt that they do. I spent a year at a University in which the entire student culture was hostile to learning. The professors had caved in, and the idea of a test was for the students to receive a summary a couple of days before that eliminated most of the material, and regurgitate it on a multiple choice test. Once that happens, you get a tacit conspiracy whereing the students and faculty exchange high grades and low expectations for high teaching evaluations, and anyone who tries to buck this gets burned. I knew within two weeks that I wouldn't be applying for the permanent position . . .
My brother wasn't cynical before he started, but after two years he left for law school. I was still an idealist when I started practicing, and it damned near killed me.
> In fact, a quick
>google search turned up [25]this study, which confirms that teachers'
>expectations do affect student learning.
death isn't the lower limit
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
A dead person would not lose a battle of wits with a small plastic soap dish. Ergo, those who would, are dumnber than dead . . .
Re:Invention without Ethics
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
>So, basically, you're saying that rich people are more intelligent
>than people who can't afford private school.
No, and that's a rather ignorant response. My family is hard-core
middle class, and my grandparents are born dirt-poor. It's not
that we could afford Catholic schools, it's that we gave up other things
to do it. Additionally, while there are Catholic schools that take all-comers
(take the Archbishops's of New York's standing offer to take the
bottom 5% from the city's school system), my high school, and all
colleges, *are* selective.
>Did it ever occur to you
>that maybe the reason that the world is full of dumbasses is because
>teachers like your brother have no expectation of intelligence from
>their students?
Your ignorance is showing. You *clearly* have no idea what my brother
did or didn't do, and apparently don't understand what happens when
eithe rhigh school teachers or college professors actually expect
people to learn.
>Did it occur to you that the clients sent to a law
>_student_ probably couldn't afford private school?
and what does that have to do with anything??? I wasn't talking
about clients as a law student, but of what I expected of people
in general at the time. It was after 5 years of practice (read the
post) with paying clients that I said I found his view optimistic.
Your eagerness to promote your egalitarian agenda is getting in the way of reading what was actually written.
yes, it is tough to tell if it's a troll or flamebait. But one minor nit:
Paper doesn't degrade in landfills. The breakdown is an aerobic process, and the landfills generally don't have the aeriation needed to do this (in fact, I doubt it's possbile). So exposed paper will rot, but buried paper will generally stay paper.
WHile I'm at it, I've lost the reference, but if you compare the production of a paper cup and a comparable styrofoam cup, it takes/uses 2-20 times as much resources/pollutant to produce the paper cup. Nonetheless, the luddites run around screaming about biodegradability, and get McDonalds and the like to irresponsibly switch from foam to paper . . .
hawk
Re:Seems wasteful to me
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
> Imagine how many
> millions of acres of forests are destroyed each year so the you
> Americans can have disposable paper plates and Dixie cups.
pretty close to, ahh, 0. Yes, two less than two.
I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but essentially all of our paper is grown on renewable tree farms. But don't let the facts get in the way of a hateful an ignorant rant.
hawk
Re:Paper Phones + Smoking
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 1
no problem--build it into the paper of the cigarette. When it goes out, the conversation is over.
:)
Re:Invention without Ethics
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
> Imagine something like
> this being so cheap that the only barrier to entry in an
> information-based economy is intelligence?
I am suddenly reminded of a conversation with my brother several years ago. I was a law student; he taught in a public high school. After something I said about "average intelligence", he told me that my notion of average intelligence was *far* too high, and biased by having attended private schools.
5 years of practicing law showed me that not only was he right about *my* notion, but that *his* concept of average intelligence was far too high, too:)
If intelligence remains a barrier, most people will still be left out. Remember, there's no lower limit to human intelligence . . .
hawk
they can be mixed . . .
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
with win98. I had to install, and then *physically* deinstall the modem, and then put it back in before it worked properly. That's the fourth hardware status . . .
While I'm at it, does anyone know how to get to the article wihtout a browser blessed by the priests of eye-candy that run their site? Lynx is taken to a redirect page, from which you can only proceed to the main page . . .
I am a lawyer, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
I've never looked at it in the intellectual property realm, but a general principle of contract law is that "mutual mistake" makes a contract voidable.
Presumably, both parties to a license agreement believed the underlying IP to be valid, so a discovery taht it woas not would be a mutual mistake. However, it is also possbile that the contract terms provide otherwise, anc ould even recite that there is a disagreement between the parties as to valididty, and that the agreement is in settlement. In that case, the agreement would continue and be enforceable.
Killing off the pests sounds fine and dandy now. BUt what if we later find that they, like the telephone dusters, serve an important purpose? By then it will be too late, as we will have had generations and generations of sterile moths . . .
> When I installed Windows 2000 on my main box,
> absolutely everything was recognized. Correctly. And the sound works.
> And the printer works. Etc.
I can't say the same for Windows 98 . . .
I'll grant it that it only hung hard enough to require a hard reboot twice during the installation procedure (in addition to the scheduled reboots).
It didn't come close to finding everything. I had to got through control panels to get sound working. And the modem? It worked the *first* time I used it. And not again. Install/deinstall. reboot. install/deinstall. reboot. still no dice.
Finally, I deinstalled twice, powered down, removed the modem, deinstalled again, powered down, put the modem back in--and it worked, as it still haden't deinstalled.
However, it still shows problems with a couple of power management tools. I deinstall them, but it puts them right back in as broken on the next boot.
I'll grant that it was easier than my first linux installation five years ago. It was worse than any for the last 4 years, or any of my *bsd installations.
> The closest thing
> it has is the K menu, which is a Start Menu rip off.
?????? I think you misspelled "Apple menu" Or does moving it from the upper left to the lower left demonstrate "innovation." Except for moving the menu bar and taking a few features I expect out, the Win95 interface is the mac multifinder interface from 87 or 88 with a couple of $20 third party extensions (Be Heirarchic and Boomerang, iirc).
Slashdot Mirror
the >'fortune' thing was explained?
It *was*, at least once this was confirmed.
There are two independent incidents. One broke the contract with the school and the code of conduct, and resuted in suspension. The second was a webpage that put up a line about hiding a shotgun with no suggestion that it was a quotation from a book and--Horror of Horrors!--the police looked into it!
Just what are we supposed to do when we see something like that? Ignore it entirely unless they've shot someone already? The police looked into it, and found no crime. What more can you ask?
hawk
:)
hawk, ducking & running
> I mean - technically nothing can ever be absolute (we can't be sure
> 1+1==2; we've just observed it throughout all of recorded history)
Oh yes, that's been proved. Take a graduate measure theory course, or maybe even an upper division undergraduate theory course. You start with the notion of a "something"--a scratch, a stick, a whatever, and build from there.
On the other hand, proving that an observed phenomenon actually corresponds to the derived "1" or "2" is another matter, but you can certainly prove 1+1=2 from the ground up . . .
hawk
> to a specific cause.
Pardon???? That's true in the newtonian universe, but not at lower levels.
At the quantum level, things are fundamentally random, and the "hidden
numbers theory" has long fallen out of fashion.
I don't know enough about thermal processes, but radioactive decay is, in thoery,purely stochastic--there are no causal variables and deviations from the mean number of decay evnts *must* be purely random.
hawk, once a physcist
>This is the typical irresponsible
>"We got burnt, so what, we had fun!".
That doesn't seem to be a fair characterization . . .
He seems to be saying that the fact that it didn't work out doesn't mean it was a bad move (or maybe I just want to read it that way . . .
A risk has to be evaluated before the chance, not after. If you go in knowing that there's a 60% chance of failure, but the payoff for the 40% chance of success makes it worth it, it was still a good decision if it comes up failure.
Additionally he got valuable experience, perhaps better than if he'd gone elsewhere.
hawk
A corporation won't even get as far as the author suggests. "Piercing the corporate veil" wipes out the corporation for all purposes, leaving the individual liable for everything. If he followed corporate procedures properly, that would not likely be a concern here. The problem, though, is that working on behalf of a corporation does *not* shiled you from liability for your own actions. Instead, the corporation is *also* liable. in the typical case, employees are not worth suing, and only the corporation is targeted. Here, though, it would be the torts committed by the individial that *are* the focus, and he would still be tartgeted without any additional defense.
>disagree with the second paragraph of the [23]United States
>Declaration of Independence?
Of course not, and that's a read herring. Equality at creation and a level playing field do not suggest that equal outcomes are likely. "Egalitarian agenda" is a bad thing when it is to be brought about by pulling down the high (the lobster effect) rather than bringing up the low.
>First of all, you're basing your argument about "average intelligence"
>on anecdotal evidence from your own life and your brother's life.
I do have a very large sample, enough to go beyond merely anecdotal. If I were to resort to anecdotes, the intelligence drops far lower
>Unless your brother teaches statistics, I don't see how his opinion is
>relevant.
He doesn't, but I do. I also have a doctorate in statistics . . . A sample of several hundred is overkill for estimating the population mean.
>I also don't understand the importance of open-door Catholic
>schools to your point, since the average American isn't Catholic and
>doesn't want a Catholic education.
It has nothing to do with Catholicsm. Typically, when the results of Catholic schools are brought up, there is a stock response about their selectivity. However, the nonselective Catholic schools also show better results than the public schools, but we're getting into side issues here. The level of performance in either type of Catholic school, as a group, is above the population mean. The level of a four year college graduate is significantly above the mean. The point is that with experience coming from being in those environments, one is exposed to a biased sample, which will cause overestimation of "average" capabilities. "Typical" abilities in any of these three groups is above "Average."
>You might also want to brush up on
>the First Amendment of the[24] United States Bill of Rights if you do
>indeed believe that private schools are the answer to raising
>intelligence.
Huh??? I'm an attorney and a civil libertarian, quite familiar with the Bill of Rights and its predecessors, both as to legal issues and philosophy. I still don't see what you're getting at.
>I am basing my argument on a social constructionist point of view.
>That is to say, people are mostly the product of their environment.
>Therefore, if the average student in your brother's classes aren't up
>to his standard of intelligence, then something about their
>surroundings is amiss.
That's entirely possible. They had many years of surroundings before getting to him. The point is that from his background, his standards and expertations were unrealistically high.
>In my earlier post, I hypothesized that cynical
>teachers contribute to an anti-learning environment.
I have no doubt that they do. I spent a year at a University in which the entire student culture was hostile to learning. The professors had caved in, and the idea of a test was for the students to receive a summary a couple of days before that eliminated most of the material, and regurgitate it on a multiple choice test. Once that happens, you get a tacit conspiracy whereing the students and faculty exchange high grades and low expectations for high teaching evaluations, and anyone who tries to buck this gets burned. I knew within two weeks that I wouldn't be applying for the permanent position . . .
My brother wasn't cynical before he started, but after two years he left for law school. I was still an idealist when I started practicing, and it damned near killed me.
> In fact, a quick
>google search turned up [25]this study, which confirms that teachers'
>expectations do affect student learning.
A dead person would not lose a battle of wits with a small plastic soap dish. Ergo, those who would, are dumnber than dead . . .
>So, basically, you're saying that rich people are more intelligent
>than people who can't afford private school.
No, and that's a rather ignorant response. My family is hard-core
middle class, and my grandparents are born dirt-poor. It's not
that we could afford Catholic schools, it's that we gave up other things
to do it. Additionally, while there are Catholic schools that take all-comers
(take the Archbishops's of New York's standing offer to take the
bottom 5% from the city's school system), my high school, and all
colleges, *are* selective.
>Did it ever occur to you
>that maybe the reason that the world is full of dumbasses is because
>teachers like your brother have no expectation of intelligence from
>their students?
Your ignorance is showing. You *clearly* have no idea what my brother
did or didn't do, and apparently don't understand what happens when
eithe rhigh school teachers or college professors actually expect
people to learn.
>Did it occur to you that the clients sent to a law
>_student_ probably couldn't afford private school?
and what does that have to do with anything??? I wasn't talking
about clients as a law student, but of what I expected of people
in general at the time. It was after 5 years of practice (read the
post) with paying clients that I said I found his view optimistic.
Your eagerness to promote your egalitarian agenda is getting in the way of reading what was actually written.
hawk
it crashes, then crashes again . . .
"he's not answering. Send another phone out his printer!"
doesn't mean you *have* to write phone numbers on it :)
Paper doesn't degrade in landfills. The breakdown is an aerobic process, and the landfills generally don't have the aeriation needed to do this (in fact, I doubt it's possbile). So exposed paper will rot, but buried paper will generally stay paper.
WHile I'm at it, I've lost the reference, but if you compare the production of a paper cup and a comparable styrofoam cup, it takes/uses 2-20 times as much resources/pollutant to produce the paper cup. Nonetheless, the luddites run around screaming about biodegradability, and get McDonalds and the like to irresponsibly switch from foam to paper . . .
hawk
> millions of acres of forests are destroyed each year so the you
> Americans can have disposable paper plates and Dixie cups.
pretty close to, ahh, 0. Yes, two less than two.
I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but essentially all of our paper is grown on renewable tree farms. But don't let the facts get in the way of a hateful an ignorant rant.
hawk
no problem--build it into the paper of the cigarette. When it goes out, the conversation is over.
:)
> this being so cheap that the only barrier to entry in an
> information-based economy is intelligence?
I am suddenly reminded of a conversation with my brother several years ago. I was a law student; he taught in a public high school. After something I said about "average intelligence", he told me that my notion of average intelligence was *far* too high, and biased by having attended private schools.
5 years of practicing law showed me that not only was he right about *my* notion, but that *his* concept of average intelligence was far too high, too
If intelligence remains a barrier, most people will still be left out. Remember, there's no lower limit to human intelligence . . .
hawk
many prisons already use paper slippers . . . :)
While I'm at it, does anyone know how to get to the article wihtout a browser blessed by the priests of eye-candy that run their site? Lynx is taken to a redirect page, from which you can only proceed to the main page . . .
or is there even anything worth reading?
awk
I've never looked at it in the intellectual property realm, but a general principle of contract law is that "mutual mistake" makes a contract voidable.
Presumably, both parties to a license agreement believed the underlying IP to be valid, so a discovery taht it woas not would be a mutual mistake. However, it is also possbile that the contract terms provide otherwise, anc ould even recite that there is a disagreement between the parties as to valididty, and that the agreement is in settlement. In that case, the agreement would continue and be enforceable.
hawk, esq.
Yes, it was a joke. joe the motheater was the only one who seemed to notice that . . .
hawk
after they mate, Mrs. Moth leaves smiling, only to find out later that Mr. Moth was firing blanks . . .
:_)
hawk
> absolutely everything was recognized. Correctly. And the sound works.
> And the printer works. Etc.
I can't say the same for Windows 98 . . .
I'll grant it that it only hung hard enough to require a hard reboot twice during the installation procedure (in addition to the scheduled reboots).
It didn't come close to finding everything. I had to got through control panels to get sound working. And the modem? It worked the *first* time I used it. And not again. Install/deinstall. reboot. install/deinstall. reboot. still no dice.
Finally, I deinstalled twice, powered down, removed the modem, deinstalled again, powered down, put the modem back in--and it worked, as it still haden't deinstalled.
However, it still shows problems with a couple of power management tools. I deinstall them, but it puts them right back in as broken on the next boot.
I'll grant that it was easier than my first linux installation five years ago. It was worse than any for the last 4 years, or any of my *bsd installations.
> The closest thing
> it has is the K menu, which is a Start Menu rip off.
?????? I think you misspelled "Apple menu" Or does moving it from the upper left to the lower left demonstrate "innovation." Except for moving the menu bar and taking a few features I expect out, the Win95 interface is the mac multifinder interface from 87 or 88 with a couple of $20 third party extensions (Be Heirarchic and Boomerang, iirc).
> And if RMS had not changed the rules with his GPL there would really
> be nothing we could do about it.
Which is, of course, why there is no other free operating system produced under older and freer licenses . . .
Sometimes I ponder what would have happened if good web search engines were around 10 years earlier, and Linux had stumbled across BSD/386 . . .