"Did you know a thief could steal all of your valuables if they used a key to unlock your front door?"
And did you know that if you give the thief the key and tell the thief when you are going to be away from home you are more at risk?
Thanks for the follow-up. I wasn't reading more into your post than you intended but I should have summed up in my own post....it is indeed ironic that the idiot could foist his beliefs upon a school system he doesn't participate in (except, I guess, as a tax payer). Unfortunately, the fundamentalists seem to be increasing in number or at least they seem increasingly successful in changing systems to fit their world views. I wonder how long it will be before we are told what we can and can't teach in our own home...
We home school our children in no small part due to the way that public schools here have become places where religious fundamentalism is taking over. Unlike many public schools around the country, we can actually teach our children the theory of evolution. Our children can read anything that we feel they have the maturity to handle. And so on.
It is ironic to us that while home schooling used to be seen as a mechanism for right-wing religious fanatics to indoctrinate their children it is increasingly embraced by left-wing wackos like us who want their children to learn everything they can and who are repulsed by book banning and other forms of legislated censorship.
Any book with the word "Devil" in the title is going to raise of the ire of the whack-job Christian-Far-Right types in rural South Carolina. As will any book that includes the words "bruised testicles" or otherwise acknowledges any aspect of the human reproductive system. Hell, I'm sure they even found something in the Agatha Christie novel to complain about.
I've been through these checkpoints in New Mexico and Texas many times but I was never curious about their history until I read the "flushing the entire constitution down the toilet these days" comment. Got me to wondering how long the checkpoints have been around and who got them started. Best I can tell, they started in the early 90's (1993 is the earliest mention I can find).
So the checkpoints are nothing new but certainly they were expanded and additionally empowered after 9/11 to (on paper anyway) act as a deterrent to terrorism. My only addition to the "flushing" comment is that it is nothing recent -- it started long ago. The Man just uses every excuse to flush more of our rights farther down the pipe. Galling.
Hands down, Phrogram is the best language for teaching young people to program. It's a language purpose-built for teaching kids (it used to be called KPL or "Kids Programming Language") and it scales with the child. A young person can start by coding simple graphical applications and "graduate" to database access and even sockets programming.
http://phrogram.com/
From the article: "Actually, he said, nothing about the bomb is secret. He smiled and added, 'The secret of the atomic bomb is how easy they are to make.'"
I've been teaching to the same age group that you are and after evaluating everything from QBasic to Java to Squeakland's EToys I settled on Phrogram about two years ago (it was called Kids Programming Language at that time) and I am well pleased. Using this language (it's much like classic Visual Basic but with tools that are more appropriate to the target age group) my kids started by learning basic concepts and syntax and slowly graduated to more complex tasks involving graphics. Best of all, Phrogram includes constructs for data manipulation so my kids are also learning what I consider "real" programming -- writing software that reads, manipulates, and stores data. There is an add-on that provides networking constructs for sockets programming and such but we haven't used it yet.
As they mature it will be natural for kids using Phrogram to transition into.Net, Java, or any other commonly used business or Internet programming language.
So, from my experience as a teacher, I suggest that you look at Phrogram.
These computers functioned for months or years. When they failed, the right question to ask first was "what has changed?" This is exactly what the Russians did. According to the author the Russians first considered potential causes stemming from the newly installed solar power wing, the visiting shuttle, and the expanded station structure (the reason for the shuttle being there). One conclusion is that they were pointing the finger at NASA and playing the blame game. Another is that they were doing what good engineers anywhere would do to debug the problem.
The author is obviously way more qualified than I to assess the situation and he may well be right but from the content of the article I came away thinking, wow, I would have looked first at all the recent changes to the station and the power supply too.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be a pussy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird/
-or-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Bird_Johnson/
"Did you know a thief could steal all of your valuables if they used a key to unlock your front door?" And did you know that if you give the thief the key and tell the thief when you are going to be away from home you are more at risk?
Sounds like an essential component for a Voight-Kampff machine.
Thanks for the follow-up. I wasn't reading more into your post than you intended but I should have summed up in my own post....it is indeed ironic that the idiot could foist his beliefs upon a school system he doesn't participate in (except, I guess, as a tax payer). Unfortunately, the fundamentalists seem to be increasing in number or at least they seem increasingly successful in changing systems to fit their world views. I wonder how long it will be before we are told what we can and can't teach in our own home...
We home school our children in no small part due to the way that public schools here have become places where religious fundamentalism is taking over. Unlike many public schools around the country, we can actually teach our children the theory of evolution. Our children can read anything that we feel they have the maturity to handle. And so on.
It is ironic to us that while home schooling used to be seen as a mechanism for right-wing religious fanatics to indoctrinate their children it is increasingly embraced by left-wing wackos like us who want their children to learn everything they can and who are repulsed by book banning and other forms of legislated censorship.
Any book with the word "Devil" in the title is going to raise of the ire of the whack-job Christian-Far-Right types in rural South Carolina. As will any book that includes the words "bruised testicles" or otherwise acknowledges any aspect of the human reproductive system. Hell, I'm sure they even found something in the Agatha Christie novel to complain about.
I've been through these checkpoints in New Mexico and Texas many times but I was never curious about their history until I read the "flushing the entire constitution down the toilet these days" comment. Got me to wondering how long the checkpoints have been around and who got them started. Best I can tell, they started in the early 90's (1993 is the earliest mention I can find).
Interesting GAO report on the Border Patrol from 2005, if anyone is interested:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05435.pdf
So the checkpoints are nothing new but certainly they were expanded and additionally empowered after 9/11 to (on paper anyway) act as a deterrent to terrorism. My only addition to the "flushing" comment is that it is nothing recent -- it started long ago. The Man just uses every excuse to flush more of our rights farther down the pipe. Galling.
Hands down, Phrogram is the best language for teaching young people to program. It's a language purpose-built for teaching kids (it used to be called KPL or "Kids Programming Language") and it scales with the child. A young person can start by coding simple graphical applications and "graduate" to database access and even sockets programming. http://phrogram.com/
From the article: "Actually, he said, nothing about the bomb is secret. He smiled and added, 'The secret of the atomic bomb is how easy they are to make.'"
I've been teaching to the same age group that you are and after evaluating everything from QBasic to Java to Squeakland's EToys I settled on Phrogram about two years ago (it was called Kids Programming Language at that time) and I am well pleased. Using this language (it's much like classic Visual Basic but with tools that are more appropriate to the target age group) my kids started by learning basic concepts and syntax and slowly graduated to more complex tasks involving graphics. Best of all, Phrogram includes constructs for data manipulation so my kids are also learning what I consider "real" programming -- writing software that reads, manipulates, and stores data. There is an add-on that provides networking constructs for sockets programming and such but we haven't used it yet. As they mature it will be natural for kids using Phrogram to transition into .Net, Java, or any other commonly used business or Internet programming language.
So, from my experience as a teacher, I suggest that you look at Phrogram.
The author is obviously way more qualified than I to assess the situation and he may well be right but from the content of the article I came away thinking, wow, I would have looked first at all the recent changes to the station and the power supply too.