So in other words the best way to steal money is from people doing victimless "crimes"? Lets put a tax on breathing! Think of all the money the government could raise!
The real issue (assuming we have government provided roads) should be safety.
Exactly. Not everyone is good at everything and the trend towards job creep leads to people who are mediocre in several areas and proficient in none. Sure, coding is useful in advertising, but it isn't crucial, that's what programmers are for. A good programmer will be much more useful creating useful, secure and bug-free code than someone who is a marketing major who learned Java on weekends.
A company who tries to save money by making people go beyond their specialty will end up being outclassed by a company who hires people for their specialty.
Well I think it should be based and focused around what the student is good at, for example the math wiz would be placed in the top school and would take mostly math classes and very few English/reading classes if he so chose. Similarly, a kid who was really good at English and reading would take mostly English/reading classes and fewer math classes if he so chose.
Today, we've got a mixture of too many academic ability levels mixed into classrooms making it impossible for those who are better at certain subjects to continue improving and impossible for those who aren't as good in those subjects to succeed in what they are good at. You've got an English class with a kid who loves reading Elizabethan literature sitting next to a kid who doesn't understand what's going on at all in the story, because of this the class is likely to be miserable for both of them, one because he doesn't understand or enjoy it, the other because the pace of the class is likely to be far too slow.
As for the non-academic kids, they're already locked into a soul-crushing prison when they're stuck in classes they don't understand and don't enjoy. There are people who simply do not have the intellectual capacity to perform and enjoy certain classes. Why stick someone who struggles with reading in a class that's reading Shakespeare, something that he has no interest or any real ability to do. Doing so is setting him up for failure. Instead, focus on his strengths. If he's good at working with his hands why not train him to be a carpenter? If he's good at working with electricity why not give him instruction on how to be an electrician? Instead, we stick these people in classes that they have no ability and no desire for and act surprised and shocked when they fail.
Not everyone should go to college. Not everyone has the capacity to understand Shakespeare. Not everyone has the ability to do calculus. Instead of pressuring these students to go to college, to read Shakespeare and to take calculus we should be guiding them to do something that they love and something that they're good at. We need janitors. There are people who are good at being janitors and love being a janitor. We also need astrophysicists, there are people who are good at being astrophysicists and love being an astrophysicist. I know you and I probably think that manual labor is perhaps the most soul-crushing of jobs and we wouldn't wish it on anyone, but there are people who no doubt think that having to work with computers all day is soul-crushing or work with numbers all day. The education system needs to find out what students are good at doing and what they like to do and put them in classes that help them reach that goal, whether that goal is to be an astrophysicist or janitor and failure is not that everyone isn't an astrophysicist but failure is that the person with a mind to be an astrophysicist and the desire becomes a janitor and the person who wants to be a janitor gets forced into thinking that he must be an astrophysicist to be successful and ends up failing at reaching that goal.
Except there -are- no real competitors to Photoshop when it comes to truly professional editing.
The GIMP is great for hobbyists but for people who edit professionally there is no competitor to Photoshop.
What Adobe is doing though, is they are shooting themselves in the foot with software that is crippled when compared to a pirated version. They're also shooting themselves in the foot if Photoshop stops becoming pirate-able because students/those in not the US, Canada and Western Europe will never even try the Adobe products if they can't get them for free and so even when they do "make it big" they aren't going to buy the Adobe products.
We need to have "tiers" of education, how they are implemented would depend on the size of the school (in larger school districts they could be broken up between buildings, in smaller ones by classes) where you'd have 3 different "tiers"
High - Students who are gifted at academics/art these are the people that are reading novels when their peers are reading picture books, students who can understand division when their peers are struggling with subtraction, etc.
Medium - Average, run of the mill students.
Low - Students who have difficulty with basic concepts and who struggle with academics.
By dividing classes up like this, you reduce bullying, encourage group/team work, you let all 3 groups achieve maximum potential by tailoring the classes towards their academic ability and letting those who struggle with academics have a chance to "catch up" and to learn useful skills without feeling pressured into a situation where they will most likely fail (college, advanced courses, etc.) but instead be able to gear them towards things in their strengths (we need both astrophysicists and plumbers). For those who are gifted with academic ability, you can let them truly thrive and be able to explore academic areas that they would otherwise have to wait years to experience.
There is no real "problem" with people dropping out of high school, nor is there a problem with people not going to college, nor is there a problem that some people don't get their masters, nor is there a problem that some people don't get their PhD. Instead, if we look at this as a "problem" we try to get people at all costs to graduate high school, mostly by dumbing down the coursework. When this happens (which it already has) a high school diploma means nothing, it has stopped being a qualification, more and more people need to go to college to get a degree as a qualification, when more and more people go to college, colleges are naturally forced to raise prices (and due to government subsidies such as Pell Grants and student loans actually have an incentive to raise prices since the price of college stops being a major barrier) due to having a finite amount of resources, and naturally college courses become dumbed down and so people need to get a post-grad degree and so on...
What needs to happen is that school councilors and teachers need to help the kids who aren't academically minded and help them find good careers doing something that they -want- to do and are good at, rather than trying to shoehorn them into a career path that they aren't good at and they don't like. Yes, education is a good thing but not everyone has the intellectual capacity to do well in high school and college, rather than looking at these people as failures, the system needs to help them not by mindlessly telling them to 'stay in school' and 'go to college'.
Revolutions generally end up with more problems than they solve. About the only "successful" revolutions have been people revolting against have been against a foreign power that generally doesn't provide much for them.
Yes, the American revolution was (mostly) successful but more often than not they just trade one form of tyranny for another (Russian revolution, French revolution, etc.)
And there has already been too much compromise made within the structure of the US government to save it beyond a complete restructuring which simply is too massive to ever realistically happen (due to stuff like precedence in the court system, the entire mess with regulatory agencies, etc. I mean just look at the number of antiquated laws on the books now!)
People buy what they want to emulate and it doesn't really matter the genre of music.
I mean, look at AC/DC's Shoot to Thrill
"Shoot to thrill, play to kill
Too many women with too many pills
Shoot to thrill, play to kill
I got my gun at the ready, gonna fire at will"
Or 22-20 Blues by Skip James (written in 1931)
"Sometimes she gets unruly
An she act like she just don't wanna do
But I get my 22-20
I cut that woman half in two"
Almost any genre of music has "questionable" lyrics. I think it is less of music making people bad as much as it is that those who are attracted to a life of crime will listen to music about a life of crime. Just like how people who like hunting, drinking beer and driving trucks listen to country music, its not because of country music that you like those things, you like those things so you listen to country music.
Because of this, there will always be an audience for "criminal" rappers, having a bunch of "quality" rappers won't change it.
Dystopian fiction has always been an interesting topic for nerds. I mean, I'm pretty sure all of us have at least read one or two good dystopian novels that have changed our ways of thinking (1984, Brave New World, We, Anthem, The Time Machine, A Clockwork Orange, etc.) and so when we see the dystopian future that we hoped only existed in the realm of fiction (or at least somewhere other than the US and Western Europe) happening in our backyard, it becomes a discussion point.
Its not even a bomb threat either! Might be a bit disturbing and might mean the guy needs some counseling but it in no way should even be considered a bomb threat!
Welcome to the USSA where freedom of speech means freedom to praise your government, where the right to bear arms means the right to go hunting, where the right to not be searched without a warrant doesn't apply, where due process can be ignored if the president wants you dead.
I'd imagine they'd have access to a -lot- of communication. Naturally not all of it, but think about where the bulk of communication goes through:
A) You've got the "bend-over-backwards for the government" big ISPs and phone networks, AT&T, Verizon, etc.
B) You've got the big e-mail providers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. that no doubt have/will bend over backwards for the government
C) You've got the social networks like Facebook that will bend over backwards
D) You've got VoIP like Skype which has backdoors
So while naturally -all- of the digital communication can't be stored/tapped a huge chunk of it theoretically can be. I'd imagine more e-mail traffic goes through Gmail in a minute than it does through your mail servers in their lifetime.
The problem with modern education is its not about knowledge, the answer to virtually any question is simply a Google away, instead its about qualification. Part of qualification is this idea that is still stuck in most of the older generation's mind that you "get what you pay for" and so even though something free might be really good, they believe that it is, by definition, inferior to a paid product. You see this all the time with antivirus software, someone buying a $20 product that is inferior to free stuff like AVG but insisting that their computer is better protected just because they "paid for it".
While its always nice to see information becoming more free, I doubt that it will really revolutionize anything until we have a shift in perspective and those in charge realize that free can often be better than paid.
Restricting AT&T/Verizon from bidding on it reduces freedom and reduces the free market more than letting all interested firms bid on it. We need a truly free market to reduce abuses, not more regulation.
Sure, there's a point to buying quality hardware, but at the same time, why is buying a $54 dongle and keeping it for a long time better than buying a $20 one today and buying an improved one for $20 sometime in the future.
This isn't 2004, you really don't have to search for laptops/wireless dongles that support Linux, its a rarity if they don't support Linux.
Except that doing that necessarily reduces our quality of life (if neonictinoid insecticides didn't improve agriculture they wouldn't be used) even if its just for X years. Its impossible to prove things with 100% certainty in the "real world" because nature isn't a lab which is why lots and lots and lots of testing in a controlled lab environment that replicates the "real world" as close to possible is necessary before you make any decisions on policy.
Any time you ban something, you are going to reduce people's quality of life which is why bans need to be fully tested. The idea of a "ban and see" approach should not be used because you are sacrificing people's quality of life for quite possibly nothing.
There is a huge disconnect between how countries are portrayed in the media and how they actually are. I mean, who would have thought back in the "cold war days" that someone would flee France for Russia for economic freedom!
What people think they believe in and what they actually believe are two separate things. I remember talking with my grandparents that they were scared that Obama would put the country under martial law, and then when Boston basically went under martial law, they praised the police and thought it was great what they were doing!
Chile is one of my options, fairly politically stable, modern, fairly free in practice, fairly cheap land, etc.
Some of the non-EU European nations wouldn't be bad, a bit more expensive, but Andorra and Switzerland are potential options. Even though I don't really like crowds and big cities, Hong Kong and Singapore wouldn't be too terrible to live in, but again its more expensive.
The real test though is how free countries are in practice, I mean, North Korea's constitution guarantees freedom of religion and expression, but it certainly isn't practiced. Similarly some countries may have more restrictive laws, but they are never enforced which provides more freedom in practice than a country with laws guaranteeing freedom but that restricts the practice of it.
The average American doesn't care about freedom anymore. Sure, they love the -illusion- of freedom, they love the -illusion- of their rights, but when it comes down to it, the average American is perfectly content and even applaud rights violations as long as they think that it won't apply to them. I mean, look at the outright celebration of essentially martial law in Boston, look at the lack of outrage against drone strikes, heck, even look at the widespread cheers for the horrible conditions at Guantanamo.
The average voter doesn't care about freedom, as long as they have their welfare checks, government jobs, medicare and social security. As long as the media can maintain the illusion that the US is the freest country in the world, there won't be any outrage.
Its amazing that even with a court system that bends over backwards to help "law enforcement" agencies, they still think they need even more ways to violate basic rights.
Its really amazing what has happened in the last 30 some odd years, to see a nation which used to truly be one of the freest in the world to now only paying lip service to freedoms. It used to be that if you wanted freedom, you came to the US, now its becoming increasingly obvious that if you value freedom, moving out of the US is the way to go.
The problem is, any time you have government, you have an incentive to be inefficient. There's little accountability beyond a couple of years and it is very unlikely that your term will end prematurely unless you get involved in some sort of major scandal.
With the TSA and FAA there is no real reason to improve safety because there's no competition. There's no reason to avoid slowdowns and bottlenecks because there's no competition. What needs to happen is that the TSA needs to be fully privatized and security needs to be dealt with on the airport/airline line, this would increase safety and reduce headaches. The FAA needs to have most of their responsibilities delegated to competing firms with certain standards (the competing companies need to have common protocols but should compete for which airports will hire them). Only then can air travel be saved.
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words the best way to steal money is from people doing victimless "crimes"? Lets put a tax on breathing! Think of all the money the government could raise!
The real issue (assuming we have government provided roads) should be safety.
Exactly. Not everyone is good at everything and the trend towards job creep leads to people who are mediocre in several areas and proficient in none. Sure, coding is useful in advertising, but it isn't crucial, that's what programmers are for. A good programmer will be much more useful creating useful, secure and bug-free code than someone who is a marketing major who learned Java on weekends.
A company who tries to save money by making people go beyond their specialty will end up being outclassed by a company who hires people for their specialty.
Well I think it should be based and focused around what the student is good at, for example the math wiz would be placed in the top school and would take mostly math classes and very few English/reading classes if he so chose. Similarly, a kid who was really good at English and reading would take mostly English/reading classes and fewer math classes if he so chose.
Today, we've got a mixture of too many academic ability levels mixed into classrooms making it impossible for those who are better at certain subjects to continue improving and impossible for those who aren't as good in those subjects to succeed in what they are good at. You've got an English class with a kid who loves reading Elizabethan literature sitting next to a kid who doesn't understand what's going on at all in the story, because of this the class is likely to be miserable for both of them, one because he doesn't understand or enjoy it, the other because the pace of the class is likely to be far too slow.
As for the non-academic kids, they're already locked into a soul-crushing prison when they're stuck in classes they don't understand and don't enjoy. There are people who simply do not have the intellectual capacity to perform and enjoy certain classes. Why stick someone who struggles with reading in a class that's reading Shakespeare, something that he has no interest or any real ability to do. Doing so is setting him up for failure. Instead, focus on his strengths. If he's good at working with his hands why not train him to be a carpenter? If he's good at working with electricity why not give him instruction on how to be an electrician? Instead, we stick these people in classes that they have no ability and no desire for and act surprised and shocked when they fail.
Not everyone should go to college. Not everyone has the capacity to understand Shakespeare. Not everyone has the ability to do calculus. Instead of pressuring these students to go to college, to read Shakespeare and to take calculus we should be guiding them to do something that they love and something that they're good at. We need janitors. There are people who are good at being janitors and love being a janitor. We also need astrophysicists, there are people who are good at being astrophysicists and love being an astrophysicist. I know you and I probably think that manual labor is perhaps the most soul-crushing of jobs and we wouldn't wish it on anyone, but there are people who no doubt think that having to work with computers all day is soul-crushing or work with numbers all day. The education system needs to find out what students are good at doing and what they like to do and put them in classes that help them reach that goal, whether that goal is to be an astrophysicist or janitor and failure is not that everyone isn't an astrophysicist but failure is that the person with a mind to be an astrophysicist and the desire becomes a janitor and the person who wants to be a janitor gets forced into thinking that he must be an astrophysicist to be successful and ends up failing at reaching that goal.
Except there -are- no real competitors to Photoshop when it comes to truly professional editing.
The GIMP is great for hobbyists but for people who edit professionally there is no competitor to Photoshop.
What Adobe is doing though, is they are shooting themselves in the foot with software that is crippled when compared to a pirated version. They're also shooting themselves in the foot if Photoshop stops becoming pirate-able because students/those in not the US, Canada and Western Europe will never even try the Adobe products if they can't get them for free and so even when they do "make it big" they aren't going to buy the Adobe products.
We need to have "tiers" of education, how they are implemented would depend on the size of the school (in larger school districts they could be broken up between buildings, in smaller ones by classes) where you'd have 3 different "tiers"
High - Students who are gifted at academics/art these are the people that are reading novels when their peers are reading picture books, students who can understand division when their peers are struggling with subtraction, etc.
Medium - Average, run of the mill students.
Low - Students who have difficulty with basic concepts and who struggle with academics.
By dividing classes up like this, you reduce bullying, encourage group/team work, you let all 3 groups achieve maximum potential by tailoring the classes towards their academic ability and letting those who struggle with academics have a chance to "catch up" and to learn useful skills without feeling pressured into a situation where they will most likely fail (college, advanced courses, etc.) but instead be able to gear them towards things in their strengths (we need both astrophysicists and plumbers). For those who are gifted with academic ability, you can let them truly thrive and be able to explore academic areas that they would otherwise have to wait years to experience.
There is no real "problem" with people dropping out of high school, nor is there a problem with people not going to college, nor is there a problem that some people don't get their masters, nor is there a problem that some people don't get their PhD. Instead, if we look at this as a "problem" we try to get people at all costs to graduate high school, mostly by dumbing down the coursework. When this happens (which it already has) a high school diploma means nothing, it has stopped being a qualification, more and more people need to go to college to get a degree as a qualification, when more and more people go to college, colleges are naturally forced to raise prices (and due to government subsidies such as Pell Grants and student loans actually have an incentive to raise prices since the price of college stops being a major barrier) due to having a finite amount of resources, and naturally college courses become dumbed down and so people need to get a post-grad degree and so on...
What needs to happen is that school councilors and teachers need to help the kids who aren't academically minded and help them find good careers doing something that they -want- to do and are good at, rather than trying to shoehorn them into a career path that they aren't good at and they don't like. Yes, education is a good thing but not everyone has the intellectual capacity to do well in high school and college, rather than looking at these people as failures, the system needs to help them not by mindlessly telling them to 'stay in school' and 'go to college'.
...which was dismissed.
They can charge anyone with nearly anything now in 2013, but thankfully we haven't gotten to the point where they can convict anyone.
The Pokerap doesn't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMk8wuw7nek
Revolutions generally end up with more problems than they solve. About the only "successful" revolutions have been people revolting against have been against a foreign power that generally doesn't provide much for them.
Yes, the American revolution was (mostly) successful but more often than not they just trade one form of tyranny for another (Russian revolution, French revolution, etc.)
And there has already been too much compromise made within the structure of the US government to save it beyond a complete restructuring which simply is too massive to ever realistically happen (due to stuff like precedence in the court system, the entire mess with regulatory agencies, etc. I mean just look at the number of antiquated laws on the books now!)
People buy what they want to emulate and it doesn't really matter the genre of music.
I mean, look at AC/DC's Shoot to Thrill
"Shoot to thrill, play to kill Too many women with too many pills Shoot to thrill, play to kill I got my gun at the ready, gonna fire at will"
Or 22-20 Blues by Skip James (written in 1931)
"Sometimes she gets unruly An she act like she just don't wanna do But I get my 22-20 I cut that woman half in two"
Almost any genre of music has "questionable" lyrics. I think it is less of music making people bad as much as it is that those who are attracted to a life of crime will listen to music about a life of crime. Just like how people who like hunting, drinking beer and driving trucks listen to country music, its not because of country music that you like those things, you like those things so you listen to country music.
Because of this, there will always be an audience for "criminal" rappers, having a bunch of "quality" rappers won't change it.
Dystopian fiction has always been an interesting topic for nerds. I mean, I'm pretty sure all of us have at least read one or two good dystopian novels that have changed our ways of thinking (1984, Brave New World, We, Anthem, The Time Machine, A Clockwork Orange, etc.) and so when we see the dystopian future that we hoped only existed in the realm of fiction (or at least somewhere other than the US and Western Europe) happening in our backyard, it becomes a discussion point.
No, instead if you're a white Christian, you're guilty of "hate crimes" which is basically the same thing as the "terrorist" label.
Its not even a bomb threat either! Might be a bit disturbing and might mean the guy needs some counseling but it in no way should even be considered a bomb threat!
Welcome to the USSA where freedom of speech means freedom to praise your government, where the right to bear arms means the right to go hunting, where the right to not be searched without a warrant doesn't apply, where due process can be ignored if the president wants you dead.
I'd imagine they'd have access to a -lot- of communication. Naturally not all of it, but think about where the bulk of communication goes through:
A) You've got the "bend-over-backwards for the government" big ISPs and phone networks, AT&T, Verizon, etc.
B) You've got the big e-mail providers, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc. that no doubt have/will bend over backwards for the government
C) You've got the social networks like Facebook that will bend over backwards
D) You've got VoIP like Skype which has backdoors
So while naturally -all- of the digital communication can't be stored/tapped a huge chunk of it theoretically can be. I'd imagine more e-mail traffic goes through Gmail in a minute than it does through your mail servers in their lifetime.
The problem with modern education is its not about knowledge, the answer to virtually any question is simply a Google away, instead its about qualification. Part of qualification is this idea that is still stuck in most of the older generation's mind that you "get what you pay for" and so even though something free might be really good, they believe that it is, by definition, inferior to a paid product. You see this all the time with antivirus software, someone buying a $20 product that is inferior to free stuff like AVG but insisting that their computer is better protected just because they "paid for it".
While its always nice to see information becoming more free, I doubt that it will really revolutionize anything until we have a shift in perspective and those in charge realize that free can often be better than paid.
Restricting AT&T/Verizon from bidding on it reduces freedom and reduces the free market more than letting all interested firms bid on it. We need a truly free market to reduce abuses, not more regulation.
Sure, there's a point to buying quality hardware, but at the same time, why is buying a $54 dongle and keeping it for a long time better than buying a $20 one today and buying an improved one for $20 sometime in the future.
This isn't 2004, you really don't have to search for laptops/wireless dongles that support Linux, its a rarity if they don't support Linux.
Except that doing that necessarily reduces our quality of life (if neonictinoid insecticides didn't improve agriculture they wouldn't be used) even if its just for X years. Its impossible to prove things with 100% certainty in the "real world" because nature isn't a lab which is why lots and lots and lots of testing in a controlled lab environment that replicates the "real world" as close to possible is necessary before you make any decisions on policy.
Any time you ban something, you are going to reduce people's quality of life which is why bans need to be fully tested. The idea of a "ban and see" approach should not be used because you are sacrificing people's quality of life for quite possibly nothing.
Yeah, I certainly can believe it.
There is a huge disconnect between how countries are portrayed in the media and how they actually are. I mean, who would have thought back in the "cold war days" that someone would flee France for Russia for economic freedom!
What people think they believe in and what they actually believe are two separate things. I remember talking with my grandparents that they were scared that Obama would put the country under martial law, and then when Boston basically went under martial law, they praised the police and thought it was great what they were doing!
Chile is one of my options, fairly politically stable, modern, fairly free in practice, fairly cheap land, etc.
Some of the non-EU European nations wouldn't be bad, a bit more expensive, but Andorra and Switzerland are potential options. Even though I don't really like crowds and big cities, Hong Kong and Singapore wouldn't be too terrible to live in, but again its more expensive.
The real test though is how free countries are in practice, I mean, North Korea's constitution guarantees freedom of religion and expression, but it certainly isn't practiced. Similarly some countries may have more restrictive laws, but they are never enforced which provides more freedom in practice than a country with laws guaranteeing freedom but that restricts the practice of it.
Yeah, like the NDAA...
The average American doesn't care about freedom anymore. Sure, they love the -illusion- of freedom, they love the -illusion- of their rights, but when it comes down to it, the average American is perfectly content and even applaud rights violations as long as they think that it won't apply to them. I mean, look at the outright celebration of essentially martial law in Boston, look at the lack of outrage against drone strikes, heck, even look at the widespread cheers for the horrible conditions at Guantanamo.
The average voter doesn't care about freedom, as long as they have their welfare checks, government jobs, medicare and social security. As long as the media can maintain the illusion that the US is the freest country in the world, there won't be any outrage.
Its amazing that even with a court system that bends over backwards to help "law enforcement" agencies, they still think they need even more ways to violate basic rights.
Its really amazing what has happened in the last 30 some odd years, to see a nation which used to truly be one of the freest in the world to now only paying lip service to freedoms. It used to be that if you wanted freedom, you came to the US, now its becoming increasingly obvious that if you value freedom, moving out of the US is the way to go.
The problem is, any time you have government, you have an incentive to be inefficient. There's little accountability beyond a couple of years and it is very unlikely that your term will end prematurely unless you get involved in some sort of major scandal.
With the TSA and FAA there is no real reason to improve safety because there's no competition. There's no reason to avoid slowdowns and bottlenecks because there's no competition. What needs to happen is that the TSA needs to be fully privatized and security needs to be dealt with on the airport/airline line, this would increase safety and reduce headaches. The FAA needs to have most of their responsibilities delegated to competing firms with certain standards (the competing companies need to have common protocols but should compete for which airports will hire them). Only then can air travel be saved.
Privatize everything. Its the only way to save air travel and bring airlines back to profitability.