I know this isn't true for large cities with huge school districts, but in small towns at least if the parents care good teachers are hired, schools get funded, and a lot of other factors get addressed besides. Lets face it, a lot of school funding comes from local sources. If parents are involved and concerned you have an army of people willing to go door to door to drum up support for a.2% tax increase that the school needs. If parents are involved the principles and super superintendents are held more accountable for who they hire and what they spend money on.
Unfortunately, as often as not, parental involvement is little more than cheering at the football game and backing cookies for the school trip. Hell, a lot of people would consider it good involvement if a parent makes sure their kid gets their homework done. That's enough to improve your kids' results, but does nothing to address the problems in the system.
Perhaps I am alone in this thinking, but it seems to me that the west is engaged in an ideological war with Islam. Which, to my mind is only reasonable given the clear incompatibility between fundamentalist Muslim and Western values.
Fixed.
There are millions of Muslims living happy, fulfilling, lives in the US, surrounded by friends and family of many religions. Grouping all Muslims as terrorists is like grouping all Catholics as KKK members.
The good readers of Slashdot got caught up in their own rhetoric when it comes to the "data as property" debate. Here's how it works in reality: data in my possession is my property. I can edit it, delete it, share it, or horde it; because it belongs to me. If I give you a copy of that data, that copy is now your property. You can edit it, delete it, share it, or horde it; I have no say over what you do. That doesn't imply that you can take a copy from me without my permission, it means that by giving you a copy I give you the rights to use that copy in any way you wish.
A) There was nothing secret about these loans; in fact, making these loans is the primary purpose of the Federal Reserve B) The way this number is calculated, the average amount loaned out at any given time would have been less than $50 billion C) This is effectively a press release from the Senator from Vermont saying what a good job he did (It appears he's up for reelection soon).
The Fed's overnight loan rate has been near zero since 2008 in a just barely successful effort to prevent runaway deflation. It is technically possible for them to make the overnight rate effectively negative if it had become necessary, but I can't imagine what uninformed pundits would tell the even more uninformed public if that were to happen.
I have had this conversation with more than one close relative:
Me: I just feel that everyone in our country should have basic healthcare. Them: Yes but then healthcare will be worse for everyone. Me: Even if that is true, which is doubtful, I'd rather everyone have decent care than only the people who can afford it having excellent care. Them: You won't be saying that when you have kids, I'll tell you that.
As a latchkey kid who got his 'do stupid things with friends' out of his system before his teenage years, I'd have to say that's preferable than the alternative. Playing, climbing, jumping, and biking with friends as a young kid made me into a socially and psychologically well rounded person, not to mention helping me to be well above average with most physical tasks. I'd say a few trips to the ER (actually only 1 in my case) was worth saving a lifetime of therapy to deal with social and psychological problems later.
Common sense goes out the window when there's a gallon of hormones flooding your system telling you that this child in particular is the single most important thing in the universe. Everything from over childproofing to being against a public healthcare options to over prescribing antibiotics to giving up freedoms for perceived safety can be traced back to the psychological changes that occur when people become parents.
As a new parent myself I can feel the invasion of these lines of thinking, and it is only through conscious, concerned effort that I maintain my pre-parent sense of right and wrong.
Your definition comes very close to having the moon declared a planet. Although at present the barycenter is below the surface of the Earth, the moon is constantly moving away from the Earth. The day will come when, by your definition, the moon will suddenly and instantly be elevated to planet-hood even though nothing obvious has changed.
Not that that makes your definition wrong of course, just pointing it out.
The argument of what is and isn't a planet is older than people realize; Isaac Asimov suggested a system where the body with the largest gravitational influence would determine if something is a planet or not. Titan is influenced by Jupiter 380 times more than it is influenced by the sun, so it is clearly a moon of Jupiter. Interestingly, the moon is influenced by the earth only 0.46 times as much as it is influenced by the sun, making the moon a planet by Asimov's definition.
I assume you mean "if I have consistent standards..." since that seems to be the most common argument.
It boils down to how many planets do you want to have in the solar system. Most honest attempts at a scientific definition that includes Pluto also include a handful of other known bodies. That's fine, 8 planets, 9 planets, 14 planets... who cares right? The problem is that modern theory predicts dozens of Pluto-like bodies in the outer solar system, and having 70+ planets listed is seen as extremely awkward, especially when only a handful of them would be scientifically interesting as individual bodies (as opposed to a class of bodies like the predicted objects in the outer Oort cloud would be).
It amounts to people having a holy war over where blue ends and purple begins. It's arbitrary. They needed a definition and it was generally felt that a definition that kept the number of planets to a reasonable number was in everyone's interest. The reason the definition was changed was because modern theory predicts dozens or even hundreds of Pluto-like objects in the outer solar system, which was thought to be an unreasonable number of bodies to be labeled as planets.
IMO, what they should have done was create a super-category 'planets', which would include the 100+ objects in the outer solar system, and at least 3 subcategories (terrestrial, gas, and dwarf) that are more specific. I think there's an argument to be made that Mercury has more in common with Eris than it does with Jupiter for instance, but then I'm not an astronomer.
I was going to post the same Wikipedia article, but then I read it and learned that the failure wasn't cause by resonance (resonance frequency of the bridge was ~1Hz, but the oscillations occurred at ~.2Hz). The Discovery channel taught me wrong but hey, at least I learned something new today.
I don't understand why computer laws are so hard. My computer is my property, as is the data stored on it. Accessing that data without my permission is trespassing. Destroying data is destruction of private property. Running software on it without my permission is conversion. Using my computer to lie to me to get my money is fraud. Threatening to delete my files unless I buy your software is blackmail. Sending threatening messages to me is assault.
Why is this so freaking hard!? We don't need laws specifically for computers or any other piece of technology, what we need is for politicians and justices to understand the fundamental concept that data is property and a computer is the just the physical (and arguably, least important) part of the system.
Even cold blooded animals generate some body heat. I would think that if you were to balloon a monitor lizard up to surapod size it's body temperature would probably be significantly higher than the environment. An Apatosaurus is 330 times more massive than a komodo dragon but has only 50 times the surface area. Quite frankly, I'd be surprised if they didn't have to go looking for shade on warm days to avoid overheating, even if they were relatively cold blooded (komodos often need to burrow through the warmest parts of the day for just that reason).
It generally makes more sense to think about the timing of individual events in terms of when the event's light cone gets to us. Granted, Betelgeuse is in a similar reference frame to us, but that doesn't change the fact that there's no such thing as simultaneity at astronomical scales. The exact time it happened relative to earth isn't the same time it happened relative to somewhere else, and even the apparent time on Earth would be different if measured by an observer moving in one direction or another relative to Earth.
Because part of fair use is that it doesn't damage the value of the original product. Wikipedia using the image does nothing to hurt sales or the original, using the image as part of the branding of your album, even a non-profit, for charity album, is confusing to the consumer and could very conceivably hurt sales of the original (people who know what the cover looks like grabbing the wrong one).
While I would personally say what he did to the image was transformative, the courts have seen things differently in the past. Anyone remember the Obama Change poster? The transformation in that case was much more dramatic than in this one and they still ended up settling out of court.
Because from a user perspective nothing had changed. A new version number is a new product, calling a minor update a new product is confusing and fragments the user base, and 10 security bug fixes is an important, but functionally minor update. If nothing else, imagine a year or two from now and Firefox is ready to put out a new release that actually is something new and exciting and they're stuck assigning it the same importance that the assigned to this security patch, because they already assigned the highest importance possible to this update.
On the other hand, this release includes essentially zero new features. Calling it a major release and incrementing the primary version number for what is essentially a security update is confusing to the point of making version numbers useless. This release doesn't even deserve a 4.1 IMO.
Don't forget that there are Pulitzer Prizes available in many categories. Should they win an award for reporting breaking news? Of course not. But they could be deserving of a prize in the Commentary, Criticism, or Editorial writing categories. And of course, there's always the fiction category.
Worse, that particular quote comes straight from the source article. Random submitter makes a mistake and Slashdot editors miss it I can understand. 'Real' writer makes a mistake and 'real' editor misses it, that's much harder to swallow.
Insurance companies got exactly what they wanted out of Obamacare. As long as every insurance company has to follow the same rules, all they need to do is increase premiums and pass on the extra costs to their customers. Forcing every American to get insurance and no public option? And you think the insurance companies are against that?
Slashdot Mirror
I know this isn't true for large cities with huge school districts, but in small towns at least if the parents care good teachers are hired, schools get funded, and a lot of other factors get addressed besides. Lets face it, a lot of school funding comes from local sources. If parents are involved and concerned you have an army of people willing to go door to door to drum up support for a .2% tax increase that the school needs. If parents are involved the principles and super superintendents are held more accountable for who they hire and what they spend money on.
Unfortunately, as often as not, parental involvement is little more than cheering at the football game and backing cookies for the school trip. Hell, a lot of people would consider it good involvement if a parent makes sure their kid gets their homework done. That's enough to improve your kids' results, but does nothing to address the problems in the system.
Perhaps I am alone in this thinking, but it seems to me that the west is engaged in an ideological war with Islam. Which, to my mind is only reasonable given the clear incompatibility between fundamentalist Muslim and Western values.
Fixed.
There are millions of Muslims living happy, fulfilling, lives in the US, surrounded by friends and family of many religions. Grouping all Muslims as terrorists is like grouping all Catholics as KKK members.
"The problem with the internet is that anyone can make a claim and never have to back it up" - Abraham Lincoln
The good readers of Slashdot got caught up in their own rhetoric when it comes to the "data as property" debate. Here's how it works in reality: data in my possession is my property. I can edit it, delete it, share it, or horde it; because it belongs to me. If I give you a copy of that data, that copy is now your property. You can edit it, delete it, share it, or horde it; I have no say over what you do. That doesn't imply that you can take a copy from me without my permission, it means that by giving you a copy I give you the rights to use that copy in any way you wish.
A) There was nothing secret about these loans; in fact, making these loans is the primary purpose of the Federal Reserve
B) The way this number is calculated, the average amount loaned out at any given time would have been less than $50 billion
C) This is effectively a press release from the Senator from Vermont saying what a good job he did (It appears he's up for reelection soon).
The Fed's overnight loan rate has been near zero since 2008 in a just barely successful effort to prevent runaway deflation. It is technically possible for them to make the overnight rate effectively negative if it had become necessary, but I can't imagine what uninformed pundits would tell the even more uninformed public if that were to happen.
I have had this conversation with more than one close relative:
Me: I just feel that everyone in our country should have basic healthcare.
Them: Yes but then healthcare will be worse for everyone.
Me: Even if that is true, which is doubtful, I'd rather everyone have decent care than only the people who can afford it having excellent care.
Them: You won't be saying that when you have kids, I'll tell you that.
As a latchkey kid who got his 'do stupid things with friends' out of his system before his teenage years, I'd have to say that's preferable than the alternative. Playing, climbing, jumping, and biking with friends as a young kid made me into a socially and psychologically well rounded person, not to mention helping me to be well above average with most physical tasks. I'd say a few trips to the ER (actually only 1 in my case) was worth saving a lifetime of therapy to deal with social and psychological problems later.
Common sense goes out the window when there's a gallon of hormones flooding your system telling you that this child in particular is the single most important thing in the universe. Everything from over childproofing to being against a public healthcare options to over prescribing antibiotics to giving up freedoms for perceived safety can be traced back to the psychological changes that occur when people become parents.
As a new parent myself I can feel the invasion of these lines of thinking, and it is only through conscious, concerned effort that I maintain my pre-parent sense of right and wrong.
Your definition comes very close to having the moon declared a planet. Although at present the barycenter is below the surface of the Earth, the moon is constantly moving away from the Earth. The day will come when, by your definition, the moon will suddenly and instantly be elevated to planet-hood even though nothing obvious has changed.
Not that that makes your definition wrong of course, just pointing it out.
The argument of what is and isn't a planet is older than people realize; Isaac Asimov suggested a system where the body with the largest gravitational influence would determine if something is a planet or not. Titan is influenced by Jupiter 380 times more than it is influenced by the sun, so it is clearly a moon of Jupiter. Interestingly, the moon is influenced by the earth only 0.46 times as much as it is influenced by the sun, making the moon a planet by Asimov's definition.
I assume you mean "if I have consistent standards..." since that seems to be the most common argument.
It boils down to how many planets do you want to have in the solar system. Most honest attempts at a scientific definition that includes Pluto also include a handful of other known bodies. That's fine, 8 planets, 9 planets, 14 planets... who cares right? The problem is that modern theory predicts dozens of Pluto-like bodies in the outer solar system, and having 70+ planets listed is seen as extremely awkward, especially when only a handful of them would be scientifically interesting as individual bodies (as opposed to a class of bodies like the predicted objects in the outer Oort cloud would be).
It amounts to people having a holy war over where blue ends and purple begins. It's arbitrary. They needed a definition and it was generally felt that a definition that kept the number of planets to a reasonable number was in everyone's interest. The reason the definition was changed was because modern theory predicts dozens or even hundreds of Pluto-like objects in the outer solar system, which was thought to be an unreasonable number of bodies to be labeled as planets.
IMO, what they should have done was create a super-category 'planets', which would include the 100+ objects in the outer solar system, and at least 3 subcategories (terrestrial, gas, and dwarf) that are more specific. I think there's an argument to be made that Mercury has more in common with Eris than it does with Jupiter for instance, but then I'm not an astronomer.
I was going to post the same Wikipedia article, but then I read it and learned that the failure wasn't cause by resonance (resonance frequency of the bridge was ~1Hz, but the oscillations occurred at ~.2Hz). The Discovery channel taught me wrong but hey, at least I learned something new today.
I don't understand why computer laws are so hard. My computer is my property, as is the data stored on it. Accessing that data without my permission is trespassing. Destroying data is destruction of private property. Running software on it without my permission is conversion. Using my computer to lie to me to get my money is fraud. Threatening to delete my files unless I buy your software is blackmail. Sending threatening messages to me is assault.
Why is this so freaking hard!? We don't need laws specifically for computers or any other piece of technology, what we need is for politicians and justices to understand the fundamental concept that data is property and a computer is the just the physical (and arguably, least important) part of the system.
Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.
FTFY
Even cold blooded animals generate some body heat. I would think that if you were to balloon a monitor lizard up to surapod size it's body temperature would probably be significantly higher than the environment. An Apatosaurus is 330 times more massive than a komodo dragon but has only 50 times the surface area. Quite frankly, I'd be surprised if they didn't have to go looking for shade on warm days to avoid overheating, even if they were relatively cold blooded (komodos often need to burrow through the warmest parts of the day for just that reason).
It generally makes more sense to think about the timing of individual events in terms of when the event's light cone gets to us. Granted, Betelgeuse is in a similar reference frame to us, but that doesn't change the fact that there's no such thing as simultaneity at astronomical scales. The exact time it happened relative to earth isn't the same time it happened relative to somewhere else, and even the apparent time on Earth would be different if measured by an observer moving in one direction or another relative to Earth.
Because part of fair use is that it doesn't damage the value of the original product. Wikipedia using the image does nothing to hurt sales or the original, using the image as part of the branding of your album, even a non-profit, for charity album, is confusing to the consumer and could very conceivably hurt sales of the original (people who know what the cover looks like grabbing the wrong one).
While I would personally say what he did to the image was transformative, the courts have seen things differently in the past. Anyone remember the Obama Change poster? The transformation in that case was much more dramatic than in this one and they still ended up settling out of court.
Because from a user perspective nothing had changed. A new version number is a new product, calling a minor update a new product is confusing and fragments the user base, and 10 security bug fixes is an important, but functionally minor update. If nothing else, imagine a year or two from now and Firefox is ready to put out a new release that actually is something new and exciting and they're stuck assigning it the same importance that the assigned to this security patch, because they already assigned the highest importance possible to this update.
Truth in history (or at least, mythical history). Supposedly nobody made more money during the gold rush years than the shovel makers.
On the other hand, this release includes essentially zero new features. Calling it a major release and incrementing the primary version number for what is essentially a security update is confusing to the point of making version numbers useless. This release doesn't even deserve a 4.1 IMO.
Also good is this piece: Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People which was followed within weeks by an article in the New Yorker about the difficulty of Romney having to explain Massachusetts' universal health care that he signed into law.
Don't forget that there are Pulitzer Prizes available in many categories. Should they win an award for reporting breaking news? Of course not. But they could be deserving of a prize in the Commentary, Criticism, or Editorial writing categories. And of course, there's always the fiction category.
Worse, that particular quote comes straight from the source article. Random submitter makes a mistake and Slashdot editors miss it I can understand. 'Real' writer makes a mistake and 'real' editor misses it, that's much harder to swallow.
Insurance companies got exactly what they wanted out of Obamacare. As long as every insurance company has to follow the same rules, all they need to do is increase premiums and pass on the extra costs to their customers. Forcing every American to get insurance and no public option? And you think the insurance companies are against that?