There's also the idea that it's best to teach kids a little of everything. The downside to that is that it turns people into jacks of a lot of trades, masters of none. I'd rather have skipped some of my art classes for science classes. Oh but of course the humanity of such a notion!
Finally someone gets it. Instead of instilling a love of learning at a young age, we pretty much tie them down and bore them to pieces. Children respond on operant principles like every other organism, what do you expect when you make school insufferable?
Problem is a lot of teachers truly aren't much better than said single-celled organisms.
What do you expect from public schools? Being a public school administrator is not exactly what kids grow up wishing they'd become, you have to be pretty dim-witted to end up in that position. Teachers are typically 1/20th of a college professor in quality, if even that; being of a lesser intelligence, it follows they have lesser reasoning abilities.
And if the girl was innocent, she'd have her phone destroyed for no reason. Also, in college, I see students text all the time in class. It's really not that disruptive at all.
En loco parentis is an invention of convenience to circumvent some of the rights of students or take/break their property. I'm quite suspicious of it being invoked in general.
You want a REAL solution? If the girl cares more about texting than learning, then perhaps she shouldn't be in school. Breaking her phone isn't going to make her suddenly value education. We have to be realistic. If a teen doesn't care about education, then don't require them to be there. We're "educating" (in the loosest sense of the word) a nation of future hamburger flippers. Why? What a waste of resource! Let the talented and smart people be in school while the uninterested live the mediocre life they obviously are going to live anyway.
They allow beating children in European countries?
Also, paddling was often used for the most minor of infractions. Adults are humans, too, and hitting a child to take your anger out on them or because you just don't like that kid is one of the "benefits" an adult can have when they get free reign to beat kids. No thanks.
Bullshit. ISP executives mostly worry about bandwidth and liability for lawsuits. They couldn't care less what you say so long as they don't get in trouble. If anything the more free speech they allow, the more attractive the service is, therefore, the more money they make.
This "OH MY GOODNESS THE RICH EXECUTIVES WANT TO BIND ME IN CHAINS" nonsense is really silly and is really is something I'd expect to see at an Obama rally instead of a website like this one...
They could be farmers, or own fruit stands, or *gasp* manufacture products for use by Chinese consumers!
Think about it, genius. If those jobs are so much better, or easy to get... why, exactly, are they working in conditions that Westerners find appalling?
What human "right"? The right to whatever an American personally thinks is the "right" amount of pay because his middle class standard is the benchmark by which all things should be judged?
If the people in China weren't willing to accept these cheap jobs, then they wouldn't have them; they'd be either going somewhere else or automating.
Ultimately the truth on why someone takes a job is far less romantic than "oppression." But it's easy to manipulate reality for ideology, particularly when it sounds just terrible for them relative to our Western standards.
When I played WoW, I talked with a Chinese gold farmer and sometimes farmed with him or the guy that played him on his other shift. He took the job to help pay for college, or so he said. He did find the grinding mind-numbingly boring, though.
The worst part of American patriotism is that we deify leaders of the past. FDR, another revered leader, also put certain racial groups into concentration camps. I've seen plenty of liberals defend him as saying that he wanted to "protect them", which is just as sensible as saying Hitler wanted to protect the Jews.
When people have a hero, they never let go, and will always ignore their evils and even make excuses for them.
We always lament the politicians of today and then glorify them long after they are dead, forgetting that they were what they were--politicians, first and foremost.
Kuchinich, I saw they were interviewing him and all they were talking about is his wife and her tongue piercing, or whatever it was. He tried to call them on it but the interviewer was pretty damn intent on wasting his time with that nonsense.
Ron Paul got the shaft as well--historic amount of donation money in one day and while there were a few blurbs they didn't run with it like they would've any other candidate, and even worse the only time he got press was when he called out the U.S.'s foreign policy and Guiliani's made his ridiculous retort--siding with Guiliani--yet never once mentioning later than Ron Paul led in military donors for the Republicans--and he was, compared to the others, a small fry.
The media exercises a huge amount of editorial control every day. The people that are honest, say things that people may not like hearing, and they don't "play ball" well with many in Congress. The people that rise to the top are the crooks, and they get respect on TV because candidates going on shows is contingent upon ratings and they won't go on if they know they'll get hardball questions.
Now, by a law interpretation, he is correct, of course--but then again, the law and what's "right" or "what makes sense" are often two VERY different animals.
No, that's a very correct interpretation, because what it comes down to is the fact that that software itself, those 1s and 0s, are still physically represented.
Personally, I think anything that can be copied really shouldn't be copyrightable, not necessarily because I like to pirate because you should be able to physically manipulate anything you buy in any way you see fit unless you give up that right through contract.
I think we really need to start re-envisioning things for the modern world. A computer program isn't like a chair, an mp3 isn't like a television, and so on. I think part of the problem is that traditionally, people have built careers on what now can be represented in binary terms and easily transferred to other people, and hence people think they have a right to treating those 1s and 0s like they were chairs or televisions (scarce resources). Music won't end, and computer programs won't stop being written, people just need to adapt to the information age.
Failure to do so will probably result in some kludge of laws that limit our freedom in ridiculous ways.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.
Slashdot Mirror
You are spot-on.
There's also the idea that it's best to teach kids a little of everything. The downside to that is that it turns people into jacks of a lot of trades, masters of none. I'd rather have skipped some of my art classes for science classes. Oh but of course the humanity of such a notion!
Finally someone gets it. Instead of instilling a love of learning at a young age, we pretty much tie them down and bore them to pieces. Children respond on operant principles like every other organism, what do you expect when you make school insufferable?
Problem is a lot of teachers truly aren't much better than said single-celled organisms.
What do you expect from public schools? Being a public school administrator is not exactly what kids grow up wishing they'd become, you have to be pretty dim-witted to end up in that position. Teachers are typically 1/20th of a college professor in quality, if even that; being of a lesser intelligence, it follows they have lesser reasoning abilities.
You forget one other large function---schools act as daycares.
And if the girl was innocent, she'd have her phone destroyed for no reason. Also, in college, I see students text all the time in class. It's really not that disruptive at all.
En loco parentis is an invention of convenience to circumvent some of the rights of students or take/break their property. I'm quite suspicious of it being invoked in general.
You want a REAL solution? If the girl cares more about texting than learning, then perhaps she shouldn't be in school. Breaking her phone isn't going to make her suddenly value education. We have to be realistic. If a teen doesn't care about education, then don't require them to be there. We're "educating" (in the loosest sense of the word) a nation of future hamburger flippers. Why? What a waste of resource! Let the talented and smart people be in school while the uninterested live the mediocre life they obviously are going to live anyway.
They allow beating children in European countries?
Also, paddling was often used for the most minor of infractions. Adults are humans, too, and hitting a child to take your anger out on them or because you just don't like that kid is one of the "benefits" an adult can have when they get free reign to beat kids. No thanks.
One word:
kdawson
Well defined, by an organization, but I do not agree with said organization's conception of "rights"
Bullshit. ISP executives mostly worry about bandwidth and liability for lawsuits. They couldn't care less what you say so long as they don't get in trouble. If anything the more free speech they allow, the more attractive the service is, therefore, the more money they make.
This "OH MY GOODNESS THE RICH EXECUTIVES WANT TO BIND ME IN CHAINS" nonsense is really silly and is really is something I'd expect to see at an Obama rally instead of a website like this one...
They could be farmers, or own fruit stands, or *gasp* manufacture products for use by Chinese consumers!
Think about it, genius. If those jobs are so much better, or easy to get... why, exactly, are they working in conditions that Westerners find appalling?
What human "right"? The right to whatever an American personally thinks is the "right" amount of pay because his middle class standard is the benchmark by which all things should be judged?
If the people in China weren't willing to accept these cheap jobs, then they wouldn't have them; they'd be either going somewhere else or automating.
would help Chinese workers because they wouldn't have to endure this kind of shit,
Can't endure a shitty job if you're begging on the street, resorting to prostitution, or just plain starving.
But, at least they aren't working in a sweatshop. Liberals once again posit a compassionate solution.
You want to compare them to slaves? Ridiculous. For one, if they automated the jobs, then these jobs WOULDN'T EXIST!
Better working a shit job than starving to death.
Ultimately the truth on why someone takes a job is far less romantic than "oppression." But it's easy to manipulate reality for ideology, particularly when it sounds just terrible for them relative to our Western standards.
When I played WoW, I talked with a Chinese gold farmer and sometimes farmed with him or the guy that played him on his other shift. He took the job to help pay for college, or so he said. He did find the grinding mind-numbingly boring, though.
Exactly. You see how people are so willing to go every length to defend their Great American Heroes that they'll try to rationalize away any atrocity?
Take no heroes, that's my philosophy. Especially politicians.
Yeah, force the Japanese americans in the suburbs to shoddy camps, having them lose their property, their homes, to "protect" them.
The worst part of American patriotism is that we deify leaders of the past. FDR, another revered leader, also put certain racial groups into concentration camps. I've seen plenty of liberals defend him as saying that he wanted to "protect them", which is just as sensible as saying Hitler wanted to protect the Jews.
When people have a hero, they never let go, and will always ignore their evils and even make excuses for them.
We always lament the politicians of today and then glorify them long after they are dead, forgetting that they were what they were--politicians, first and foremost.
The Huffington Post is also extremely Obama-supporting :)
Politics as usual, of course.
Kuchinich, I saw they were interviewing him and all they were talking about is his wife and her tongue piercing, or whatever it was. He tried to call them on it but the interviewer was pretty damn intent on wasting his time with that nonsense.
Ron Paul got the shaft as well--historic amount of donation money in one day and while there were a few blurbs they didn't run with it like they would've any other candidate, and even worse the only time he got press was when he called out the U.S.'s foreign policy and Guiliani's made his ridiculous retort--siding with Guiliani--yet never once mentioning later than Ron Paul led in military donors for the Republicans--and he was, compared to the others, a small fry.
The media exercises a huge amount of editorial control every day. The people that are honest, say things that people may not like hearing, and they don't "play ball" well with many in Congress. The people that rise to the top are the crooks, and they get respect on TV because candidates going on shows is contingent upon ratings and they won't go on if they know they'll get hardball questions.
That's not working so well today though, is it?
Err, oops, yeah, that's what I meant.
I still wrote it, though.
Now, by a law interpretation, he is correct, of course--but then again, the law and what's "right" or "what makes sense" are often two VERY different animals.
No, that's a very correct interpretation, because what it comes down to is the fact that that software itself, those 1s and 0s, are still physically represented.
Personally, I think anything that can be copied really shouldn't be copyrightable, not necessarily because I like to pirate because you should be able to physically manipulate anything you buy in any way you see fit unless you give up that right through contract.
I think we really need to start re-envisioning things for the modern world. A computer program isn't like a chair, an mp3 isn't like a television, and so on. I think part of the problem is that traditionally, people have built careers on what now can be represented in binary terms and easily transferred to other people, and hence people think they have a right to treating those 1s and 0s like they were chairs or televisions (scarce resources). Music won't end, and computer programs won't stop being written, people just need to adapt to the information age.
Failure to do so will probably result in some kludge of laws that limit our freedom in ridiculous ways.
I've always been a PC at heart.
Not like the rest, the others. Everyone around me. I was at odds with my society and knew it early since birth. Unlike them, I did not "Think Different!"--the mantra of the Macs around me, the phrase on all the billboards in the city that served as a reminder to its citizenry. Sameness pervaded the essence of my being and no amount of self-conditioning I did could change that. Eventually, I gave up and isolated myself emotionally from society.
I gaze at the faces going by, the white earphones contrasting their black turtlenecks, connecting their ears to their pockets, their blank faces engrossed in hip Indie rock music and various garage bands. I envied them for their perfection against my flaws and my compulsive nature to expand, to burden my life with troubles instead of remaining, like them, simple and easy to deal with. The grandest of virtues, simplicity... the philosophy by our loyal benefactor Steve Jobs, who descended from the heavens, creating the Earth, the iron, the wind and the rain. Steve Jobs, who defined the parameters of existence, the one who set about the patterns of reality, the constants, the variables. He who made gravity, electromagnetic energy, and shaped atomic structures and brought forth motion. From these things, he crafted the elements, processed them, refined them, and from these things engineered Apple products through the purity of his mind. Each Apple product was individually crafted by his own hands with the programming code used to run each device having being compiled in his brain and uploaded to each device telepathically, breathing life and perfection into each and every unit.
Except, it seems, for me, for I was not among the many. I was a PC. They were Macs. I've always been a cold, stiff person. I got by, disguising myself by keeping my non-Ipod music player safely out of sight, which I use because of my depraved nature demanding more functionality than the simple and easy-to-use Ipods have to offer... In the safety of my own home, behind locked doors, I ran a Forbidden, a contraband computer from more depraved, earlier days that was not given the love and blessing of being birthed by Steve Jobs. I dual booted, out of the great sin of curiosity-- curiosity, a shameful value of a PC, as curiosity has no place where simplicity matters most--using two of the great unutterable blasphemies-- something called "Windows Vista" and something else called "Linux." Although, as I mentioned before, although my tendency to be a PC and towards conformity has always been inherent to me, I was truly transformed when I found these old things in a hidden cache of computer parts predating The Purging. Perhaps the greatest sin of all, the single evil that, if discovered, would damn me forever, was the fact that my mouse had more than one button.
As I walked on among the Macs on the streets, passing the Starbuckses as I went along, I wondered how it all came to this. I glanced at The Holy Marks on the foreheads as the people wandered down the streets, the Bitten Apple tattooed on all our of us at birth, and wondered if, perhaps, there could be something more to life. But again, this was a PC's thought, and not, like everyone elses', a Mac's. We were to hold ourselves to the philosophy of Steve Jobs--so as his products were designed for idiots, so too were we to be idiots. But I was not a Mac--I was not an idiot. I was simply too complicated to be a worthwhile person.
Nature called. I found a nearby public iPoo--squeaky clean and sparkly white, things weren't all bad--and let myself go, expelling the waste that had accumulated inside me. After relieving myself and committing the overly-complicated and thus illegal act of wiping my ass (I did not flush as iPoos, designed to be idiot-proof, did not flush) I left and once again wandered the streets aimlessly, hoping to find some meaning in a world where I simply did not belong, a world where if my true nature was discovered, I would be endlessly persecuted by smug, self-righteous sons of bitches.