it's pretty dumb to allow "soliciting sexual services" but forbiding "paying for sexual services".
Actually, it's pretty brilliant.
In "smart" countries like the US, both sides are illegal, and punishment is much more harsh on the prostitutes than on the johns (they consider it a drug dealer vs. user paradigm). So life is pretty bad for the aforementioned ladies of the night: who are they to run to when a client is physically abusive? How much of a hurry would you be in to run to the police and tell them things they can (and will!) lock you up for?
Now look at the case in Sweden: clients had better toe the line and be good, or they'll be looking at charges of soliciting for sex on top of assault, etc.
It may not be "tough on crime", but it's a great way to help protect a typically-disadvantaged group of people.
This is Japan. We don't have much in the way of lawns. And we get plenty of rain, so it's really not needed in the first place. Right idea, wrong country to try it in, I'm afraid.
The other ideas sound pretty good, though - I'm pretty sure the majority of organic waste gets summarily burned, which strikes me as a potential missed opportunity.
The nuclear bit hasn't produced much in the way of damage, at this point, but the tsunami did far, far more damage to Japan than Katrina did to the United States.
This. Speaking from on-the-ground here in Japan, the west is throwing a bit fit over nuclear scaremongering, but national news coverage is far more focused on the earthquake and tsunami. People within 30km of the station have evacuated, and that has its own problems, but the biggest difficulty right now is the mass destruction of homes and shelters, given the cold weather - it's currently -1C in Sendai.
Nuclear winter makes for much sexier headlines, but it's the plain old regular kind that's of biggest concern right now.
So ask yourself: If a person who made something you want expects compensation, why do you deserve to have it for free?
You're begging the question, but even despite that I can say we deserve it because that is the natural state of things. It's just not the way the world works. There is no Natural Law of Copyright that smites those who spread ideas. Talking about why we deserve it is missing the point. And that point is that it's downright unreasonable to expect the kind of draconian enforcement and effort required for their desired compensation.
It made sense to ban the unauthorized commercial publication of books, back when writing and publishing and distributing works was so difficult. Average Joe wasn't using the printing press in his basement to cobble together a few copies of a story. Average Jane wasn't plinking away on a typewriter in her free time. It took a lot of effort to put together works of art, and it was easy to protect because so few people could work against it - there weren't enough copiers. Society accepted the then-light burden of enforcement in order to make the heinously difficult enterprise of making art a little easier.
But flash forward to the 21st century and things couldn't be more different. It's never been easier or cheaper to make art. Books can be written on word processors with a fraction of the effort and printed with a fraction of the cost of years past. Quality music recording can be done for pennies on the dollar of what it used to take. Digital film and ever-cheaper-and-better cameras have made filmmaking available to the average enthusiast. And masses of people have been doing these things.
Meanwhile, it's no longer the unscrupulous upper-class printing press owners who have the ability to copy - it's as easy as clicking the forward button on your email. It's as effortless as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Everyone's doing it. And you want us to unceasingly police it, to throw people in jail and take away their rights and ruin their lives, just to keep up the side of a bargain we no longer need to get art? Why do you deserve that?
As a long-term Japanese resident who interacts with high-school-age Japanese kids daily (they're my students), let me inform you that that's not the whole story. She may be one of the kids on the straight and narrow, but there are plenty of kids here who don't bat an eye at drinking. Heck, even plenty of the "good" kids do some not-so-legitimate things from time to time, just like they do anywhere else. People are kept in line less by appeals to some high concept of honor or tradition and more by the simple fact that Japan is full of people so there's always someone watching you.
Interestingly, there's less concern over underage drinking than underage smoking - as you say, alcohol vending machines just require you insert money, but cigarette machines require a Taspo card.
Classical Greece and Rome only had a life expectancy of 28 years. Medieval Britain had a life expectancy of 30. Early 20th Century had a life expectancy of 30-45 years.
The average life expectancy in Colonial America was under 25 years in the Virginia colony,[18] and in New England about 40% of children failed to reach adulthood.
So in order to marry, have children and live long enough to care for them, you would have to marry at an early age of around 14 through 16. This probably the reasoning behind the NC state law mentioned earlier in this thread.
A popular misconception about life expectancy is that people living beyond the staged age was unusual.
...
This ignores the fact that life expectancy changes depending on age and the one often presented is the "at birth" number. For example, a Roman Life Expectancy table at the University of Texas shows that at birth the life expectancy was 25 but if one lived to the age of 5 one's life expectancy jumped to 48.
Life expectancy rates throughout history look weak because a huge proportion of children never lived to adulthood. When half your population dies by age 5 and the other half lives to 45, you get a life expectancy of around 25. I can't think of any time period where people who lived through childhood couldn't presume to live long enough to raise a family without having to get started at 14.
Several sources place 18th and 19th century literacy rates above 95%.
Well, I don't know where they get their numbers from, but the official statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp) show a steadily increasing literacy rate over time that didn't break 95% until 1930. 1 in 4 blacks were illiterate until 1920, historical data showing more like 80% illiteracy among blacks around the time of emancipation (1870, the oldest figures immediately available).
There has long been a tradition of excellent elite schooling among the upper class, but the data just doesn't support the thesis for the population as a whole. Public education was key for all those who weren't already on top of the social ladder.
That's an interesting thought, but the characters in question have a long, long history in the Japanese language. The summary can sound misleading, but these are not new words to anyone but the list-makers: by and large, they're words like "key", "curse", "depression", "pot", and a particularly manly but common-as-dirt way of saying "I". Really, the list still excludes plenty of characters used every day, while including some quite rare ones, too.
I must admit to a certain level of ignorance here, but how many new characters are being created in China? Not considering the simplification of the character set, of course.
As cool as that would be, it would give Japanese the same difficulties English has with obscure words: adding more roots to build words out of only complicates the process of learning the vocabulary. As it is, most new words are made by putting together the roots of existing words (which, conveniently, are typically represented by a kanji), and consequently it can be much easier to understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Often, in Japanese people will ask of an unfamiliar word how it is written; in English this occurs somewhat too, but it seems to be a more prevalent feature in Japanese.
Really, although the prospect of 2000+ kanji is quite daunting to people when they're starting out, once you have them as a solid base they make new vocabulary acquisition so much easier. It's wonderful.
I believe the GP was giving the English plural ending of -s as an example of an inflectional ending, rather than as an example of an actual Japanese inflectional ending, but I'll agree it's somewhat unclear for those who don't already know what we're talking about.
To make things a bit clearer: nouns are often written with kanji, although there are exceptions; verbs and many adjectives are written with kanji + hiragana. One of the primary functions of the hiragana on verbs and adjectives is to conjugate them: for example, in contrast to English go/went, in Japanese it's iku/itta, where the 'i' in both words uses the same kanji, and hiragana are used for ku/tta respectively.
Terms need wikipedia pages to prove legitimacy now?
FWIW, I read the GP's use of "corporate anarchists" to refer to those who wish for an essentially unfettered market (there's the anarchy) whose primary actors are corporations. I don't quite understand the GP's scare-bolding of Republican and Dick Cheney (or, for that matter, Bob Weir), but the terms he uses, at least, aren't so unclear.
I'm not talking about a building that they're paying someone to live in. I'm talking about a country they entered illegally. This is not their home. Any residence they might take up here is illegal.
And here I always thought that home was your environment: your friends, your family, the community you contribute to and are a part of. Apparently none of that has any validity, and it's instead dependent on some mystical property of the land on which you are born, or of the purity of the blood that runs through your veins, as decided by other people hundreds of years ago and upheld by yet others who may be thousands of miles away who neither you nor I will likely ever meet nor be able to hold accountable. Maybe it's just me, but that argument has little resemblance to any idea of "home" I can conjure up.
You would declare America to be the home of the children of expats who have never seen the country and never want to, while denying it to those born a few miles south of the right patch of soil who live their whole lives working to make their place in pursuit of the American dream. Furthermore, your argument ignores (or simply isn't aware of?) the 45% of illegal immigrants who are overstays, and therefore entered the country illegally, many of whom are in the process of naturalizing as citizens but whose status in the meanwhile is either in legal limbo or technically illegal.
Japan doesn't like admitting the Zainichi (Korean multi-generational permanent residents of Japan, leftovers from Japanese colonial rule) exist. And there are plenty of us white gaijin who do just fine, too.
To summarize, I argue this: The whole point of a math class is to be abstract. If it's not abstract, then it's not math. If you didn't need to practice your abstraction skills, then you wouldn't need any math classes.
Certainly, math from the level of Algebra onward is an exercise in abstraction. However, that's a far cry from saying that abstraction is the goal of math education. As the GP and others (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1557648&cid=31215548 for example) suggest, many people understand math better when they have concrete examples to work with. This concept makes me think of a gem from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann, from a chapter titled A Different Box of Tools:
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions.
I don't mean to knock abstraction, as it's vital to learn, as you argue in your blog post, with your wonderful Introductory Algebra example. As you say, trying out all values would take "a hella long time". Still, many students understand the abstract generalization better after you give a few concrete examples. That's all people are asking for: solid applications of things in order to connect them to what they know and can understand, instead of sequences of meaningless rules of operations.
It is certainly true, as you suggest, that the damage would be limited much more in a private system. I'm a bit torn whether that's really better, though; if a large settlement is justified in a case like this (which I think we'd all agree, as it's an egregious breach of privacy), the school district has the pockets to pay for it, whereas little barebones private schools could only pay out the proceeds from the fire-sale prices of the now-defunct school's property. In other words, the school district has the money to actually pay up; a private school would fold and grant little restitution.
Of course, the "best" solution would be the fee being levied upon those ultimately culpable for the situation (the voters whose elected officials either condoned or didn't stop it), with their resultant wising up and electing responsible and right-respecting school board leadership. The much more likely scenario for public schools is a pay freeze or cut for staff and a freeze on repairs and maintenance for the foreseeable future, which is considerably less appealing. Because of this, I can't say that I'm at all unsympathetic to your position on limiting damages.
If this was a privately run school, there would be no taxpayer involvement. The students could sue the offending school into oblivion and not worry about destroying local education (or their own property values) for years to come.
Err...
I'll grant that it would be nice if taxpayers didn't have to pay for the school's wrongdoing, but I think you'd find that privatizing schools wouldn't stop such a thing from destroying local education. If a school is driven to ruin, regardless of the circumstances, it's a disruption to the education of hundreds of students. The schooling market is also not quick to respond to a change in demand, as well; it would be quite difficult to spit the defunct school's students among the few other schools in the area, likely result in overcrowding of the classes and schools, nor could you expect a new school to jump right into existence to fill the gap.
There are strengths to the idea of a privatized school system, but it's not a total panacea, that's for sure.
you were also likely to die by 35 during the time of Bill.
This seemed not quite right to me, so I did a little research.
According to not only the Wikipedia page on life expectancy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy), but also its sources ( http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/guide12/part06.htmlhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/241864.stm ), the closest relevant figures presented are for 13th-14th century England. It is true that in this case the average life expectancy was roughly 30. However, don't get the wrong idea; this isn't some Logan's Run-style situation where the "average" person dies at 30. Infant and youth mortality rates were quite high, skewing the average down, but in the words of the BBC,
However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties.
People may have been likely to die by 35 during the time of Bill, as you say, but dying at that age was hardly considered a long or full life.
As a western male living in Japan, I can attest that foreigners are (generally) accepted at capsule hotels.
The tattoo issue is one worth knowing about for visitors. I've never had trouble at capsule hotels, but at public baths and spas (sento and onsen) I've known most places to bar entry if you have visible ink. I find that most of them don't kick you out if you're already inside, though they might want you to be circumspect.
Most sane countries have public transportation (train stations, etc) directly connected to or adjoining their airports. Most of those places have some kind of turnstile or one-way gate. I see no reason why people couldn't deal with similar gates just because we put them in an airport.
What is it about air travel that makes people think it's so unique?
It's not all bad. At least according to wiki, Japan has one of the lowest incarceration rates of the civilized world. The conviction rate may be high, but the sentencing is extremely lenient and the total number of convictions is low. [...] In the U.S., prosecutors fail to get a conviction about 30-40% of the time in trials, and a vastly higher percentage of the population is prosecuted.
Ever wonder why Japan has such a high conviction rate?
In Japan, confessions don't get overturned. There's really no provision for confessions under duress, and confessions trump material evidence. This leads prosecutors to do whatever they can to get confessions.
In Japan, you can be held by the police for up to 23 days. During those 23 days, life will be hell. You will be subjected to endless hours of interrogations, little sleep, crowded conditions, and no exercise (unless you count 15 minutes a day in a crowded room where everyone is smoking - which international law doesn't). You can get a lawyer after the first 72 hours, but you are only allowed to communicate with them in Japanese and in the presence of a police officer.
Japan is a great country, but hope to god no one suspects you of anything there.
You need to add some more questions. A very important one I can think of is "How long do they request to have this power?"
I understand your feeling, but I'm cynical enough to think that the stated duration is almost irrelevant. They made the bill "sunset", potentially, to try to make it seem like they'd play nice once they took care of the "bad guys", but there are always more bad guys. Even if we get some minor reform at this stage, they'll keep their hands on the majority of these "emergency" powers long beyond the point when it can be a campaign issue - already too many accept the way things are as the way they will always be, and it will soon be portrayed that returning to where things were would neuter our police forces.
Remember the controversy over the Bush tax cuts sunsetting? They were easier to pass because they were "temporary", but allowing tax cuts to expire takes political cojones, because you're accused of raising taxes, which costs some major political capital to counter. Conversely, every time you get to vote to keep the tax cuts, you're a hero for cutting taxes. What politician doesn't want that?
I wouldn't be surprised to see more of this strategy in the future.
The problem is that you reach a point in the game where it switches from:
"Just play a couple hours on weekends, or whenever you feel like"
To:
"You MUST be on and at the instance at exactly 5:45 PM PST you MUST remain on for 4 hours MINIMUM, then be free the next day at exactly 5:45 PM PST in case we don't finish the instance today. You MUST research all the bosses before entering the instance. You MUST be using one of the 2 acceptable specs for your class online, or you will have to respec, grinding gold to afford it. You MUST carry a minimum amount of healing potions, meaning you have to grind gold to buy them. You MUST install seedy chat software, and WOW add-ins, you can't participate with the default program."
I see this sentiment a lot, but I really don't feel it has that much basis in reality. The truth isn't nearly as jarring.
There are plenty of guilds with no attendance requirements, who do what they can with the people that show up. They don't kill the latest content, typically, because they aren't organized enough and don't care enough. However, by comparing yourself as a newly-max-level character to those who are killing the latest content, you're skipping quite a few steps in the middle, which is why you see such an abrupt lack of transition.
Yes, if your performance is sub-par, people will sometimes try to get you to change the way you use your talent points (a system with unique skills for each class, by which you specialize to gain some abilities and make others stronger or faster), but it's not for no reason: it makes you better, and more efficient. It's not some evil conspiracy; other people won't want to play with you if you're not pulling your weight.
The gold you're arguing about grinding for is negligible: re-specializing costs at most 50 gold, when you can earn about 150 gold in half an hour doing a double handful of daily quests.
This is the first time I've heard of people call Ventrilo seedy software. Yes, it helps to have the equivalent of a VoIP party line going to coordinate things and chat. There are a couple of really useful add-ons that people often ask their teammates to use, and they can be a hassle, but I don't see why they themselves are such a deal-breaker. Overall, if you have no problem with Blizzard Warden, I don't know why a couple of other programs would be so odious.
I feel a little dirty for being a Blizzard apologist here. There are plenty of things to criticize about the game. But arguing that it's still necessarily "too hardcore" isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
it's pretty dumb to allow "soliciting sexual services" but forbiding "paying for sexual services".
Actually, it's pretty brilliant.
In "smart" countries like the US, both sides are illegal, and punishment is much more harsh on the prostitutes than on the johns (they consider it a drug dealer vs. user paradigm). So life is pretty bad for the aforementioned ladies of the night: who are they to run to when a client is physically abusive? How much of a hurry would you be in to run to the police and tell them things they can (and will!) lock you up for?
Now look at the case in Sweden: clients had better toe the line and be good, or they'll be looking at charges of soliciting for sex on top of assault, etc.
It may not be "tough on crime", but it's a great way to help protect a typically-disadvantaged group of people.
This is Japan. We don't have much in the way of lawns. And we get plenty of rain, so it's really not needed in the first place. Right idea, wrong country to try it in, I'm afraid.
The other ideas sound pretty good, though - I'm pretty sure the majority of organic waste gets summarily burned, which strikes me as a potential missed opportunity.
The nuclear bit hasn't produced much in the way of damage, at this point, but the tsunami did far, far more damage to Japan than Katrina did to the United States.
This. Speaking from on-the-ground here in Japan, the west is throwing a bit fit over nuclear scaremongering, but national news coverage is far more focused on the earthquake and tsunami. People within 30km of the station have evacuated, and that has its own problems, but the biggest difficulty right now is the mass destruction of homes and shelters, given the cold weather - it's currently -1C in Sendai.
Nuclear winter makes for much sexier headlines, but it's the plain old regular kind that's of biggest concern right now.
So ask yourself: If a person who made something you want expects compensation, why do you deserve to have it for free?
You're begging the question, but even despite that I can say we deserve it because that is the natural state of things. It's just not the way the world works. There is no Natural Law of Copyright that smites those who spread ideas. Talking about why we deserve it is missing the point. And that point is that it's downright unreasonable to expect the kind of draconian enforcement and effort required for their desired compensation.
It made sense to ban the unauthorized commercial publication of books, back when writing and publishing and distributing works was so difficult. Average Joe wasn't using the printing press in his basement to cobble together a few copies of a story. Average Jane wasn't plinking away on a typewriter in her free time. It took a lot of effort to put together works of art, and it was easy to protect because so few people could work against it - there weren't enough copiers. Society accepted the then-light burden of enforcement in order to make the heinously difficult enterprise of making art a little easier.
But flash forward to the 21st century and things couldn't be more different. It's never been easier or cheaper to make art. Books can be written on word processors with a fraction of the effort and printed with a fraction of the cost of years past. Quality music recording can be done for pennies on the dollar of what it used to take. Digital film and ever-cheaper-and-better cameras have made filmmaking available to the average enthusiast. And masses of people have been doing these things.
Meanwhile, it's no longer the unscrupulous upper-class printing press owners who have the ability to copy - it's as easy as clicking the forward button on your email. It's as effortless as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Everyone's doing it. And you want us to unceasingly police it, to throw people in jail and take away their rights and ruin their lives, just to keep up the side of a bargain we no longer need to get art? Why do you deserve that?
As a long-term Japanese resident who interacts with high-school-age Japanese kids daily (they're my students), let me inform you that that's not the whole story. She may be one of the kids on the straight and narrow, but there are plenty of kids here who don't bat an eye at drinking. Heck, even plenty of the "good" kids do some not-so-legitimate things from time to time, just like they do anywhere else. People are kept in line less by appeals to some high concept of honor or tradition and more by the simple fact that Japan is full of people so there's always someone watching you.
Interestingly, there's less concern over underage drinking than underage smoking - as you say, alcohol vending machines just require you insert money, but cigarette machines require a Taspo card.
Don't forget the change in life expectancy.
Classical Greece and Rome only had a life expectancy of 28 years. Medieval Britain had a life expectancy of 30. Early 20th Century had a life expectancy of 30-45 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
So in order to marry, have children and live long enough to care for them, you would have to marry at an early age of around 14 through 16. This probably the reasoning behind the NC state law mentioned earlier in this thread.
From the same article, under "Misconceptions":
A popular misconception about life expectancy is that people living beyond the staged age was unusual.
...
This ignores the fact that life expectancy changes depending on age and the one often presented is the "at birth" number. For example, a Roman Life Expectancy table at the University of Texas shows that at birth the life expectancy was 25 but if one lived to the age of 5 one's life expectancy jumped to 48.
Life expectancy rates throughout history look weak because a huge proportion of children never lived to adulthood. When half your population dies by age 5 and the other half lives to 45, you get a life expectancy of around 25. I can't think of any time period where people who lived through childhood couldn't presume to live long enough to raise a family without having to get started at 14.
Several sources place 18th and 19th century literacy rates above 95%.
Well, I don't know where they get their numbers from, but the official statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp) show a steadily increasing literacy rate over time that didn't break 95% until 1930. 1 in 4 blacks were illiterate until 1920, historical data showing more like 80% illiteracy among blacks around the time of emancipation (1870, the oldest figures immediately available).
There has long been a tradition of excellent elite schooling among the upper class, but the data just doesn't support the thesis for the population as a whole. Public education was key for all those who weren't already on top of the social ladder.
It looks like his website is linked in his profile as http://thewaxwingslain.com/ with the music itself a few clicks away at http://thewaxwingslain.com/dlmusic.htm . Music's available in mp3 and (limitedly) in ogg. No donation link I can find.
C'mon guys, let's give it a listen.
That's the same situation as Japanese, then. I thought so, but I wanted to be sure.
Thanks.
That's an interesting thought, but the characters in question have a long, long history in the Japanese language. The summary can sound misleading, but these are not new words to anyone but the list-makers: by and large, they're words like "key", "curse", "depression", "pot", and a particularly manly but common-as-dirt way of saying "I". Really, the list still excludes plenty of characters used every day, while including some quite rare ones, too.
I must admit to a certain level of ignorance here, but how many new characters are being created in China? Not considering the simplification of the character set, of course.
As cool as that would be, it would give Japanese the same difficulties English has with obscure words: adding more roots to build words out of only complicates the process of learning the vocabulary. As it is, most new words are made by putting together the roots of existing words (which, conveniently, are typically represented by a kanji), and consequently it can be much easier to understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Often, in Japanese people will ask of an unfamiliar word how it is written; in English this occurs somewhat too, but it seems to be a more prevalent feature in Japanese.
Really, although the prospect of 2000+ kanji is quite daunting to people when they're starting out, once you have them as a solid base they make new vocabulary acquisition so much easier. It's wonderful.
I believe the GP was giving the English plural ending of -s as an example of an inflectional ending, rather than as an example of an actual Japanese inflectional ending, but I'll agree it's somewhat unclear for those who don't already know what we're talking about.
To make things a bit clearer: nouns are often written with kanji, although there are exceptions; verbs and many adjectives are written with kanji + hiragana. One of the primary functions of the hiragana on verbs and adjectives is to conjugate them: for example, in contrast to English go/went, in Japanese it's iku/itta, where the 'i' in both words uses the same kanji, and hiragana are used for ku/tta respectively.
Terms need wikipedia pages to prove legitimacy now?
FWIW, I read the GP's use of "corporate anarchists" to refer to those who wish for an essentially unfettered market (there's the anarchy) whose primary actors are corporations. I don't quite understand the GP's scare-bolding of Republican and Dick Cheney (or, for that matter, Bob Weir), but the terms he uses, at least, aren't so unclear.
I'm not talking about a building that they're paying someone to live in. I'm talking about a country they entered illegally. This is not their home. Any residence they might take up here is illegal.
And here I always thought that home was your environment: your friends, your family, the community you contribute to and are a part of. Apparently none of that has any validity, and it's instead dependent on some mystical property of the land on which you are born, or of the purity of the blood that runs through your veins, as decided by other people hundreds of years ago and upheld by yet others who may be thousands of miles away who neither you nor I will likely ever meet nor be able to hold accountable. Maybe it's just me, but that argument has little resemblance to any idea of "home" I can conjure up.
You would declare America to be the home of the children of expats who have never seen the country and never want to, while denying it to those born a few miles south of the right patch of soil who live their whole lives working to make their place in pursuit of the American dream. Furthermore, your argument ignores (or simply isn't aware of?) the 45% of illegal immigrants who are overstays, and therefore entered the country illegally, many of whom are in the process of naturalizing as citizens but whose status in the meanwhile is either in legal limbo or technically illegal.
Japan doesn't like admitting the Zainichi (Korean multi-generational permanent residents of Japan, leftovers from Japanese colonial rule) exist. And there are plenty of us white gaijin who do just fine, too.
Uhh I recall watching a video in middle school (a 15 years ago??) about the 1990 Chinese Census of 2 billion people
That's quite a feat, given that the 2000 Chinese Census put the population of China at only 1,242,612,226, not much over half that.
Some census.
To summarize, I argue this: The whole point of a math class is to be abstract. If it's not abstract, then it's not math. If you didn't need to practice your abstraction skills, then you wouldn't need any math classes.
Certainly, math from the level of Algebra onward is an exercise in abstraction. However, that's a far cry from saying that abstraction is the goal of math education. As the GP and others (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1557648&cid=31215548 for example) suggest, many people understand math better when they have concrete examples to work with. This concept makes me think of a gem from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann, from a chapter titled A Different Box of Tools:
I had a scheme, which I still use today when somebody is explaining something that I'm trying to understand: I keep making up examples. For instance, the mathematicians would come in with a terrific theorem, and they're all excited. As they're telling me the conditions of the theorem, I construct something which fits all the conditions.
I don't mean to knock abstraction, as it's vital to learn, as you argue in your blog post, with your wonderful Introductory Algebra example. As you say, trying out all values would take "a hella long time". Still, many students understand the abstract generalization better after you give a few concrete examples. That's all people are asking for: solid applications of things in order to connect them to what they know and can understand, instead of sequences of meaningless rules of operations.
Thanks for the response.
It is certainly true, as you suggest, that the damage would be limited much more in a private system. I'm a bit torn whether that's really better, though; if a large settlement is justified in a case like this (which I think we'd all agree, as it's an egregious breach of privacy), the school district has the pockets to pay for it, whereas little barebones private schools could only pay out the proceeds from the fire-sale prices of the now-defunct school's property. In other words, the school district has the money to actually pay up; a private school would fold and grant little restitution.
Of course, the "best" solution would be the fee being levied upon those ultimately culpable for the situation (the voters whose elected officials either condoned or didn't stop it), with their resultant wising up and electing responsible and right-respecting school board leadership. The much more likely scenario for public schools is a pay freeze or cut for staff and a freeze on repairs and maintenance for the foreseeable future, which is considerably less appealing. Because of this, I can't say that I'm at all unsympathetic to your position on limiting damages.
If this was a privately run school, there would be no taxpayer involvement. The students could sue the offending school into oblivion and not worry about destroying local education (or their own property values) for years to come.
Err...
I'll grant that it would be nice if taxpayers didn't have to pay for the school's wrongdoing, but I think you'd find that privatizing schools wouldn't stop such a thing from destroying local education. If a school is driven to ruin, regardless of the circumstances, it's a disruption to the education of hundreds of students. The schooling market is also not quick to respond to a change in demand, as well; it would be quite difficult to spit the defunct school's students among the few other schools in the area, likely result in overcrowding of the classes and schools, nor could you expect a new school to jump right into existence to fill the gap.
There are strengths to the idea of a privatized school system, but it's not a total panacea, that's for sure.
you were also likely to die by 35 during the time of Bill.
This seemed not quite right to me, so I did a little research.
According to not only the Wikipedia page on life expectancy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy), but also its sources ( http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/guide12/part06.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/241864.stm ), the closest relevant figures presented are for 13th-14th century England. It is true that in this case the average life expectancy was roughly 30. However, don't get the wrong idea; this isn't some Logan's Run-style situation where the "average" person dies at 30. Infant and youth mortality rates were quite high, skewing the average down, but in the words of the BBC,
People may have been likely to die by 35 during the time of Bill, as you say, but dying at that age was hardly considered a long or full life.
As a western male living in Japan, I can attest that foreigners are (generally) accepted at capsule hotels.
The tattoo issue is one worth knowing about for visitors. I've never had trouble at capsule hotels, but at public baths and spas (sento and onsen) I've known most places to bar entry if you have visible ink. I find that most of them don't kick you out if you're already inside, though they might want you to be circumspect.
Most sane countries have public transportation (train stations, etc) directly connected to or adjoining their airports. Most of those places have some kind of turnstile or one-way gate. I see no reason why people couldn't deal with similar gates just because we put them in an airport.
What is it about air travel that makes people think it's so unique?
It's not all bad. At least according to wiki, Japan has one of the lowest incarceration rates of the civilized world. The conviction rate may be high, but the sentencing is extremely lenient and the total number of convictions is low. [...] In the U.S., prosecutors fail to get a conviction about 30-40% of the time in trials, and a vastly higher percentage of the population is prosecuted.
Ever wonder why Japan has such a high conviction rate?
In Japan, confessions don't get overturned. There's really no provision for confessions under duress, and confessions trump material evidence. This leads prosecutors to do whatever they can to get confessions.
In Japan, you can be held by the police for up to 23 days. During those 23 days, life will be hell. You will be subjected to endless hours of interrogations, little sleep, crowded conditions, and no exercise (unless you count 15 minutes a day in a crowded room where everyone is smoking - which international law doesn't). You can get a lawyer after the first 72 hours, but you are only allowed to communicate with them in Japanese and in the presence of a police officer.
Japan is a great country, but hope to god no one suspects you of anything there.
Some links: Twelve days of detention: http://www.debito.org/policeinterrogations.html
Two years from a forced confession: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8290767.stm
Seventeen years from a forced confession: http://www.tokyomango.com/tokyo_mango/2009/06/man-intimidated-into-admitting-to-murder-is-set-free-after-17-years-in-prison.html
What to do if you're arrested in Japan: http://www.debito.org/whattodoif.html#arrested
Stay safe, everyone.
You need to add some more questions. A very important one I can think of is "How long do they request to have this power?"
I understand your feeling, but I'm cynical enough to think that the stated duration is almost irrelevant. They made the bill "sunset", potentially, to try to make it seem like they'd play nice once they took care of the "bad guys", but there are always more bad guys. Even if we get some minor reform at this stage, they'll keep their hands on the majority of these "emergency" powers long beyond the point when it can be a campaign issue - already too many accept the way things are as the way they will always be, and it will soon be portrayed that returning to where things were would neuter our police forces.
Remember the controversy over the Bush tax cuts sunsetting? They were easier to pass because they were "temporary", but allowing tax cuts to expire takes political cojones, because you're accused of raising taxes, which costs some major political capital to counter. Conversely, every time you get to vote to keep the tax cuts, you're a hero for cutting taxes. What politician doesn't want that?
I wouldn't be surprised to see more of this strategy in the future.
The problem is that you reach a point in the game where it switches from:
"Just play a couple hours on weekends, or whenever you feel like"
To:
"You MUST be on and at the instance at exactly 5:45 PM PST you MUST remain on for 4 hours MINIMUM, then be free the next day at exactly 5:45 PM PST in case we don't finish the instance today. You MUST research all the bosses before entering the instance. You MUST be using one of the 2 acceptable specs for your class online, or you will have to respec, grinding gold to afford it. You MUST carry a minimum amount of healing potions, meaning you have to grind gold to buy them. You MUST install seedy chat software, and WOW add-ins, you can't participate with the default program."
I see this sentiment a lot, but I really don't feel it has that much basis in reality. The truth isn't nearly as jarring.
There are plenty of guilds with no attendance requirements, who do what they can with the people that show up. They don't kill the latest content, typically, because they aren't organized enough and don't care enough. However, by comparing yourself as a newly-max-level character to those who are killing the latest content, you're skipping quite a few steps in the middle, which is why you see such an abrupt lack of transition.
Yes, if your performance is sub-par, people will sometimes try to get you to change the way you use your talent points (a system with unique skills for each class, by which you specialize to gain some abilities and make others stronger or faster), but it's not for no reason: it makes you better, and more efficient. It's not some evil conspiracy; other people won't want to play with you if you're not pulling your weight.
The gold you're arguing about grinding for is negligible: re-specializing costs at most 50 gold, when you can earn about 150 gold in half an hour doing a double handful of daily quests.
This is the first time I've heard of people call Ventrilo seedy software. Yes, it helps to have the equivalent of a VoIP party line going to coordinate things and chat. There are a couple of really useful add-ons that people often ask their teammates to use, and they can be a hassle, but I don't see why they themselves are such a deal-breaker. Overall, if you have no problem with Blizzard Warden, I don't know why a couple of other programs would be so odious.
I feel a little dirty for being a Blizzard apologist here. There are plenty of things to criticize about the game. But arguing that it's still necessarily "too hardcore" isn't one of them.