Are there really 53 different products there? I might have miscounted.
I think people on Slashdot especially are smart enough to be insulted. What's the difference between a 7-day thermostat, a 5-2 day thermostat, and a 5-1-1 thermostat? I'm pretty sure if you popped the cheap injection-molded plastic cover off, you'd find the same 8-bit microprocessor and eeprom in each of them. Why should they all be priced differently? And could you or I, sitting in a room somewhere, even dream up fifty different feature sets for a thermostat? The fact that they named their high end product "prestige" is itself an indictment.
Honeywell wouldn't be sinking so much $$ into legal attacks if they didn't feel threatened, and they wouldn't feel threatened if they knew they had a better product. The issue is, Honeywell has had decades with minimal competition in this market, so they let everybody have their way with the interface. Look at the web page! No two of them have the same interface, because the interface is a feature. Seriously, game controllers have better interfaces.
Decades later, I still have to walk over and switch from "heat" to "cool" and back, dozens of times each year. My house is five, FIVE, years old. If Honeywell really gave two craps about the consumers, they could have migrated THAT one useful feature downmarket at some point. Nobody buys a house based on the thermostat, and both Honeywell and the builders know it. That's why most of the thermostats installed in new homes, regardless of the home's price, are crappy. Do I really need to buy a million dollar home before I get a thermostat that both "heats" and "cools" without my intervention?
Honeywell marketed all these at the residential builders, that's why there's dozens of different price points and no consistency in the interfaces or clarity in the feature sets. Nest is marketing their one product at the people who actually live in the homes, who have to actually use and live with these things.
Concur! Geez the lame bottom-of-the-market-sucking thermostat they included in my freaking expensive-as-Hell house is so cheap looking, under-brained, and just plain unconsidered as to be insulting. Honeywell did a lousy job innovating, and thus allowed a market opening in a market they OWNed for decades. I figure they deserve what they get.
Well, there's plenty of competency in ESA, I think. Space is hard. More than half the missions sent to Mars don't arrive safely, that's one data point. ESA has a list of successful missions also - Mars Express is a good example, and an example of what makes ESA a stakeholder in Mars exploration. ESA contributes a lot of good instruments to missions we fly. Also, SpaceWire (and its follow-on, SpaceFibre) is an example of a technology in which Europe has taken the lead, and NASA follows. And, in fairness, ESA operates under a certain brain drain, as I know a fair number of scientists at NASA (Goddard) who are expats from Europe (and Japan).
Ultimately its in NASA's interest to enlist all friendly countries' space programs in planetary science and exploration, even if the overhead costs are higher in the short term. These efforts are towards answering questions that all humanity is trying to answer. Everybody will benefit. This is one way in which the human race will grow.
I don't think ExoMars' defunding, if the rumor is true, would be an example of a choice NASA has made, but rather a budget choice coming down from higher levels in the administration. If all that is true, it's really unfortunate, because, in the long term, its in America's interests to engage with other competent space programs, and to prove ourselves to be a trustworthy partner.
Comments like the parent here just drive me nuts! I should give up even reading much less replying to any space-related items here. "NASA is great at viewgraphs and theme parks, but as far as science goes, they're rapidly falling behind." Where does this kind of sentiment come from? Is it in any way bounded by reality? NASA's recent track record for planetary science is pretty good, held up to that of other national space programs (not to disparage those other programs, but just as a point of comparison);
- JAXA's Akatsuki-Venus mission failed to enter orbit around Venus last year
- Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Martian satellites failed to escape Earth's orbit
- ESA's Mars Express mission lost it's Beagle-2 lander (crashed?)
- Cassini's Huygens probe had a fair number of problems, including, at one point, its spinning in the opposite to intended direction during descent
- India's Chandrayaan lunar probe operated for 312 days before failing , rather than its nominal 2-year mission (probably for thermal reasons)
Compare with - NASA's MESSENGER, in orbit around Mercury for a year and producing a ream of science data - NASA's Kepler mission, boosting our count of exoplanets by something like an order of magnitude - NASA's Mars Rovers, 8 years into a nominal 30-day mission - NASA's Juno probe, on its way to Jupiter - NASA's Cassini flagship mission, far into extended mission already and aiming to keep working through 2017 - NASA's MSL, over budget but successfully on its way to Mars - NASA's New Horizons, now closer to Pluto than any other man-made object, and moreso every day
For the record, other current missions up for extensions include EPOXI, GRAIL, MRO, Mars Odyssey Orbiter, and LRO.
Yes I'm cherry-picking a bit here, but overlooking dozens of other programs also. It's not my job to document all this - but before posting snide little "NASA's good at viewgraphs" comments, maybe do a minimal amount of search.
Parent comment is plain wrong. NASA is desperate for funds, happy to work with any capable and trustworthy collaborators. Cassini-Huygens is an example of a working collaboration.
I think it's disingenuous to say to ESA "hey, we can't cover this, hope you can find another partner" this far in. Maybe one can look at the overruns for MSL and JSWT and say that this is the responsible thing to do, to allow those two programs to finish, but in the middle and long term, this is going to prevent any further NASA-ESA collaboration. Where is the big dividend from having shut down the shuttle program?
The spacecraft is the example of what can be achieved by "hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry and the uniquely human drive to explore..." If it were easy, someone else would have done it, or even attempted it. The stamp is just a stamp. Get a clue.
There's a lot of 'Hurf durf, the space program is no more. Our technical edge is gone. Oh, woe!' on Slashdot, and it really ticks me off. Hey, why don't you read a bit what NASA's been up to lately, rather than griping about how 1960s America put aside the Apollo program after the space race was won?
The sterling engine work that NASA is doing is to make the RTGs more efficient - this is not for propulsion but for providing power to other systems on the spacecraft (avionics, transceiver, instruments). Part of the motivation is to reduce weight, or to get more power for the same amount of weight. The other issue is that the isotopes which are commonly used for RTGs were byproducts of nuclear weapon production, hence, have not been produced (in America, at least) for decades.
Buzz. Just because you personally cannot ride in it, doesn't mean it's not a spacecraft (one word.) NASA has been calling them spacecraft for decades. The Voyagers are spacecraft. The Pioneers and Vikings were spacecraft. Sputnik was a spacecraft.
Here's the official NASA mission page;
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/pioneer/ "The Pioneer series of spacecraft performed first-of-their-kind explorations of the Sun..."
Programming is the new literacy. I wrestle with this a lot now, with a couple small kids - I realize there's a window coming up, where their reading and writing skills will be sufficient, and the willingness to follow their dad on some dubious venture is still approximately the equivalent mass of their attention span, when they could be introduced to programming in a fun, safe context. Public school is not going to try to address programming until much much later for them, if at all.
I think it's wrong to make promises about job eligibility based on a single course of anything. And surely there are other, better programs around, better places to start. But I think we all, as ambassadors and good citizens of what amounts to a foreign culture, be encouraging and supportive of people trying to take beginning steps towards understanding us and our medium.
I like this line in the parent; "Only good can come from average people coming to realize that this stuff isn't some magic inborn to the 7th son of a rocket scientist; it just takes curiosity and persistence."
Amen to that! And I remember I lived in mortal fear of someday poking the fatal address that could do (allegedly) actual damage to your C64 - it's amazing to me now that I no longer remember what that address is.
God bless (and a big thanks) to the people who made and programmed the C64. I surely would have chosen a different path without it.
My intent with the surgeon analogy is to point out that what a lot of teachers do is really quite specialized, and you might think twice about presuming you could pop open an instruction book or a google search and then do it yourself. And, when a surgeon performs a routine operation, he's likely trained for it and performed it several times before, been critiqued by experts and peers, improved his technique etc. In contrast, if I were performing an appendectomy on my own daughter, it would surely be my first attempt, and my own daughter would be the one subject to all my errors. My level of concern for her is not a sufficient protection from making any mistakes.
But if you're really earnestly working towards better education for your own kids than is offered at your local public school, reading up on teaching techniques, interacting with a lot of other home-schoolers and learning from their efforts, and convinced that your kids are none-the-worse or even better off for it, truly, then I say Go for it. But all you have to do is look up and down this thread to discover that a lot of home-schoolers really do it for their own political or religious agendas rather than any conviction about the quality of education their kids receive. Let's take a look (these are all quotes from this very web page);
"Schools aren't there because we want to give kids an education, they're there to promote a fascist agenda. Oh sure, you COULD use public education to educate, but that's not what it's for in this country. The people I feel most sorry for are of course the students, the future being corrupted through today, but the people I feel second most sorry for are the instructors, who are for the most part unwitting dupes being taken advantage of by the powers that be, doing their part to keep us all mediocritized."
"What will really send a signal that something is changing the dynamic regarding schools is when parents decide that $5-10k per year in property taxes is a rather excessive price to pay so that the Democrats can have a loyal voting and protesting block that we call teacher's unions. Bought and paid for with your tax dollars."
"Meanwhile, in a public school other people choose what your kids get to learn and how they get to learn it, other kids get to teach yours social skills, and you get to, well, basically nothing. Is it any wonder that kids end up as ignorant sociopaths who can't stand their parents?"
"Because the teachers will fight this like everything after Gutenberg, with teeth and claws."
"At our local public school, kids receive more political/social education than actual knowledge."
"With the creation of the Dept. of Education to legislate education from as far from the classroom as possible, traditional schooling died. It used to be that children were taught to think critically and be agile-minded problem-solvers. But, agile thinking leads to the discovery that some students are better at it than others. That all changed with the Dept. of Ed's mission to make everyone the same and abolish the differences between individual students - institutionalized denial that some kids are just smarter than others."
"It's national bankruptcy and high cost teachers that are going to reduce actual 3rd party instruction capacity. "
Well, OK, I'm willing to be convinced, or at least open to seeing new information. Please show me 'Many studies that show the opposite to be true'.
Even if what you say is true, I still will say that 'abysmal results of public education' is a little unfair. The alternative to public education isn't everyone home-schooling their children, which is simply unrealistic. The alternative to public education isn't everyone paying for their own private education, which is also implausible. The only real alternative to public education, for everyone everywhere in America, is no education, and in comparison to that, I'm fairly sure public education's record, in this generation and previous ones, stands up pretty well.
Yes, hear hear! We homeschool as well! Also, I repair my own car - especially the brakes and the steering, which I'm especially good at. I provide doctoring and medical advice for my family as well - why go to some outside 'specialist' who may or may not be qualified in the subject. My daughter's appendectomy turned out especially well. Getting a surgeon for that is the path of least resistance and it's 'what's done'. We do our own prescription glasses also - bake them in the oven! It works great. Money is the only legitimate barrier for most people.
I'm sorry, but when I see arguments like those in the parent post, I see red. People home school for lots of reasons, but I object to the rationalization that goes on, that everyone who uses a public or private school is somehow less engaged or dodging responsibility. There's a tremendous body of study into child development, cognitive development, social development, theories of learning. Real, professional teachers should continue to learn and refine their professional practice, just as doctors, lawyers, and engineers do. The notion that I should just discard my own career, for which I may have spent several years or decades of study and specialization, to instead fake my way through teaching (at all grade levels) with a much lesser degree of knowledge and preparation, at the expense and risk of my own child's development and success, is just wrong for most people. It's exactly because I am an engaged and caring parent that I found a good public school and got my daughter in it.
A second thing I'm going to say is that it's very hard for a lot of home school kids to qualify for, or compete for, a lot of different kinds of secondary education and a lot of career fields. College admissions counselors are not going to see grades and recommendations written out by the child's own parents in the same light as other kinds of credentials. I had a friend who had a friend who approached me to ask how to get their home-schooled son some summer experience (I work in a kind of high-tech and academic situation) and the plain truth is that I couldn't offer anything to them. We have summer interns, and some other kinds of programs, and those are all pretty strongly competed for, among the local public schools. Those kinds of early experiences surely look good on college resumes.
That's just one anecdote, sure. But I think if you look around carefully and honestly, you will see that a lot of public schools are big enterprises now, with a lot of specialized teaching (technology, medicine, arts, the trades...). As a home-school parent, you might very well do a good job teacing fourth-grade geometry, but I think it would be a rare parent who could do a better job teaching (and preparing for what comes after high-school) every subject that a student might take a deeper interest in. Even in the rare case where that is true, the children in question are going to have an uphill battle getting into some kinds of post-secondary schools afterwards.
Statistics prove it! Also, I've read that Apple users have poor personal hygiene, poor grammar, and they tend to be poorer than Android users at sports involving any kinds of mittens or gloves. They have poor depth perception and have less tolerance to squeaky chalkboard noises. They are congenitally incapable of playing trombones, and as a class of people have flatter arches and more brittle cuticles than their non-walled-garden counterparts. SUCK IT apple-heads, revenge is suh-weeeeeee-et!
I'm sure it occurred to lots of people. Who brought it to market as a product, made it work on an available platform, committed the resources to it to scale it up and improve it over time, marketed it and sold it to people, stood by the product through some initial gaffes? Apple took a lot of risks, made an investment in something, working under the conviction that the market will reward real substantial improvements in the human-machine interface. (This is similar to how they worked through their productivity tools to make them usable on an iPad.) Where Google does those kinds of things, I applaud them as well.
(I really like, for instance, Gmail, Google Sketchup, Google docs. I'm not a zealot for one side or the other.)
Basically both companies are missing a big opportunity. Users, I'm fairly sure, would like to select from between a large cast of voices and personalities. You ought to be able do download a new one wirelessly from iTunes, say. Or maybe you'd like a kind of schizophrenic phone, with one kind of personality that reads the news to you, and a different one to nag you with pending to-do lists.
Yes, but Google didn't think to try to do this until Apple made it the primary feature of a new product. Apple continues to innovate the UI in big ways. I give Google a lot of credit for working towards a driverless car, but in several other instances recently, it seems they've either been following other companys' products, or killing their own development efforts right out from under fairly large groups of appreciative users.
Me: What could be a huge market for tablet devices which utilize native handwriting recognition and run industry standard software? Siri: I found 7 industry standards... 3 of them are not far from you: [...]
Me: No, no, Siri, listen, I need a huge market for tablet devices which utilize native handrwriting recognition! Siri: The Ojibwa and Tuskarora Iroquois are recognized Native American tribes near your location.
Me: Siri, are you dumb? I am looking for a huge market for tablet devices which utilize native handrwriting recognition! Siri: I found 5 markets for tablets are near your location. Tap the one you want directions to:
Slashdot Mirror
There's a link from this page to the app store;
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/epoapps/
I have it on my own iphone, so I'm sure it exists. It's not very exciting just now, (though you can see the images from the Jupiter flyby).
Already, NH has prompted much more thorough scrutiny of Pluto, resulting in the discovery of a new (fourth) moon;
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/20jul_p4/
And hey, the program is trying to select a member of the Kuiper Belt to visit beyond Pluto, and they're crowdsourcing the search;
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-06/22/crowd-source-new-horizons-next-destination
Also, there's a New Horizons app in the iPhone App store (don't know if there's an Android version).
Dying for an iOS app for this, so that I can say goodbye to autocorrect.
http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/products/thermostats/
Are there really 53 different products there? I might have miscounted.
I think people on Slashdot especially are smart enough to be insulted. What's the difference between a 7-day thermostat, a 5-2 day thermostat, and a 5-1-1 thermostat? I'm pretty sure if you popped the cheap injection-molded plastic cover off, you'd find the same 8-bit microprocessor and eeprom in each of them. Why should they all be priced differently? And could you or I, sitting in a room somewhere, even dream up fifty different feature sets for a thermostat? The fact that they named their high end product "prestige" is itself an indictment.
Honeywell wouldn't be sinking so much $$ into legal attacks if they didn't feel threatened, and they wouldn't feel threatened if they knew they had a better product. The issue is, Honeywell has had decades with minimal competition in this market, so they let everybody have their way with the interface. Look at the web page! No two of them have the same interface, because the interface is a feature. Seriously, game controllers have better interfaces.
Decades later, I still have to walk over and switch from "heat" to "cool" and back, dozens of times each year. My house is five, FIVE, years old. If Honeywell really gave two craps about the consumers, they could have migrated THAT one useful feature downmarket at some point. Nobody buys a house based on the thermostat, and both Honeywell and the builders know it. That's why most of the thermostats installed in new homes, regardless of the home's price, are crappy. Do I really need to buy a million dollar home before I get a thermostat that both "heats" and "cools" without my intervention?
Honeywell marketed all these at the residential builders, that's why there's dozens of different price points and no consistency in the interfaces or clarity in the feature sets. Nest is marketing their one product at the people who actually live in the homes, who have to actually use and live with these things.
Concur! Geez the lame bottom-of-the-market-sucking thermostat they included in my freaking expensive-as-Hell house is so cheap looking, under-brained, and just plain unconsidered as to be insulting. Honeywell did a lousy job innovating, and thus allowed a market opening in a market they OWNed for decades. I figure they deserve what they get.
Go Nest!
Well, there's plenty of competency in ESA, I think. Space is hard. More than half the missions sent to Mars don't arrive safely, that's one data point. ESA has a list of successful missions also - Mars Express is a good example, and an example of what makes ESA a stakeholder in Mars exploration. ESA contributes a lot of good instruments to missions we fly. Also, SpaceWire (and its follow-on, SpaceFibre) is an example of a technology in which Europe has taken the lead, and NASA follows. And, in fairness, ESA operates under a certain brain drain, as I know a fair number of scientists at NASA (Goddard) who are expats from Europe (and Japan).
Ultimately its in NASA's interest to enlist all friendly countries' space programs in planetary science and exploration, even if the overhead costs are higher in the short term. These efforts are towards answering questions that all humanity is trying to answer. Everybody will benefit. This is one way in which the human race will grow.
For anybody with a real interest, here is a link to each of NASA's current missions;
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html
I don't think ExoMars' defunding, if the rumor is true, would be an example of a choice NASA has made, but rather a budget choice coming down from higher levels in the administration. If all that is true, it's really unfortunate, because, in the long term, its in America's interests to engage with other competent space programs, and to prove ourselves to be a trustworthy partner.
Comments like the parent here just drive me nuts! I should give up even reading much less replying to any space-related items here. "NASA is great at viewgraphs and theme parks, but as far as science goes, they're rapidly falling behind." Where does this kind of sentiment come from? Is it in any way bounded by reality? NASA's recent track record for planetary science is pretty good, held up to that of other national space programs (not to disparage those other programs, but just as a point of comparison);
- JAXA's Akatsuki-Venus mission failed to enter orbit around Venus last year
- Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Martian satellites failed to escape Earth's orbit
- ESA's Mars Express mission lost it's Beagle-2 lander (crashed?)
- Cassini's Huygens probe had a fair number of problems, including, at one point, its spinning in the opposite to intended direction during descent
- India's Chandrayaan lunar probe operated for 312 days before failing , rather than its nominal 2-year mission (probably for thermal reasons)
Compare with
- NASA's MESSENGER, in orbit around Mercury for a year and producing a ream of science data
- NASA's Kepler mission, boosting our count of exoplanets by something like an order of magnitude
- NASA's Mars Rovers, 8 years into a nominal 30-day mission
- NASA's Juno probe, on its way to Jupiter
- NASA's Cassini flagship mission, far into extended mission already and aiming to keep working through 2017
- NASA's MSL, over budget but successfully on its way to Mars
- NASA's New Horizons, now closer to Pluto than any other man-made object, and moreso every day
For the record, other current missions up for extensions include EPOXI, GRAIL, MRO, Mars Odyssey Orbiter, and LRO.
Yes I'm cherry-picking a bit here, but overlooking dozens of other programs also. It's not my job to document all this - but before posting snide little "NASA's good at viewgraphs" comments, maybe do a minimal amount of search.
Parent comment is plain wrong. NASA is desperate for funds, happy to work with any capable and trustworthy collaborators. Cassini-Huygens is an example of a working collaboration.
I think it's disingenuous to say to ESA "hey, we can't cover this, hope you can find another partner" this far in. Maybe one can look at the overruns for MSL and JSWT and say that this is the responsible thing to do, to allow those two programs to finish, but in the middle and long term, this is going to prevent any further NASA-ESA collaboration. Where is the big dividend from having shut down the shuttle program?
MESSENGER surely did get a stamp -
http://www.universetoday.com/85391/alan-shepard-and-messenger-stamps-unveiled-at-kennedy-space-center-ceremony/
The spacecraft is the example of what can be achieved by "hard work, technical excellence, the spirit of scientific inquiry and the uniquely human drive to explore ..." If it were easy, someone else would have done it, or even attempted it. The stamp is just a stamp. Get a clue.
There's a lot of 'Hurf durf, the space program is no more. Our technical edge is gone. Oh, woe!' on Slashdot, and it really ticks me off. Hey, why don't you read a bit what NASA's been up to lately, rather than griping about how 1960s America put aside the Apollo program after the space race was won?
The sterling engine work that NASA is doing is to make the RTGs more efficient - this is not for propulsion but for providing power to other systems on the spacecraft (avionics, transceiver, instruments). Part of the motivation is to reduce weight, or to get more power for the same amount of weight. The other issue is that the isotopes which are commonly used for RTGs were byproducts of nuclear weapon production, hence, have not been produced (in America, at least) for decades.
Buzz. Just because you personally cannot ride in it, doesn't mean it's not a spacecraft (one word.) NASA has been calling them spacecraft for decades. The Voyagers are spacecraft. The Pioneers and Vikings were spacecraft. Sputnik was a spacecraft.
Here's the official NASA mission page;
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/pioneer/ ..."
"The Pioneer series of spacecraft performed first-of-their-kind explorations of the Sun
Programming is the new literacy. I wrestle with this a lot now, with a couple small kids - I realize there's a window coming up, where their reading and writing skills will be sufficient, and the willingness to follow their dad on some dubious venture is still approximately the equivalent mass of their attention span, when they could be introduced to programming in a fun, safe context. Public school is not going to try to address programming until much much later for them, if at all.
I think it's wrong to make promises about job eligibility based on a single course of anything. And surely there are other, better programs around, better places to start. But I think we all, as ambassadors and good citizens of what amounts to a foreign culture, be encouraging and supportive of people trying to take beginning steps towards understanding us and our medium.
I like this line in the parent; "Only good can come from average people coming to realize that this stuff isn't some magic inborn to the 7th son of a rocket scientist; it just takes curiosity and persistence."
Amen to that! And I remember I lived in mortal fear of someday poking the fatal address that could do (allegedly) actual damage to your C64 - it's amazing to me now that I no longer remember what that address is.
God bless (and a big thanks) to the people who made and programmed the C64. I surely would have chosen a different path without it.
My intent with the surgeon analogy is to point out that what a lot of teachers do is really quite specialized, and you might think twice about presuming you could pop open an instruction book or a google search and then do it yourself. And, when a surgeon performs a routine operation, he's likely trained for it and performed it several times before, been critiqued by experts and peers, improved his technique etc. In contrast, if I were performing an appendectomy on my own daughter, it would surely be my first attempt, and my own daughter would be the one subject to all my errors. My level of concern for her is not a sufficient protection from making any mistakes.
But if you're really earnestly working towards better education for your own kids than is offered at your local public school, reading up on teaching techniques, interacting with a lot of other home-schoolers and learning from their efforts, and convinced that your kids are none-the-worse or even better off for it, truly, then I say Go for it. But all you have to do is look up and down this thread to discover that a lot of home-schoolers really do it for their own political or religious agendas rather than any conviction about the quality of education their kids receive. Let's take a look (these are all quotes from this very web page);
"Schools aren't there because we want to give kids an education, they're there to promote a fascist agenda. Oh sure, you COULD use public education to educate, but that's not what it's for in this country. The people I feel most sorry for are of course the students, the future being corrupted through today, but the people I feel second most sorry for are the instructors, who are for the most part unwitting dupes being taken advantage of by the powers that be, doing their part to keep us all mediocritized."
"What will really send a signal that something is changing the dynamic regarding schools is when parents decide that $5-10k per year in property taxes is a rather excessive price to pay so that the Democrats can have a loyal voting and protesting block that we call teacher's unions. Bought and paid for with your tax dollars."
"Meanwhile, in a public school other people choose what your kids get to learn and how they get to learn it, other kids get to teach yours social skills, and you get to, well, basically nothing. Is it any wonder that kids end up as ignorant sociopaths who can't stand their parents?"
"politically correct social-transformation curriculum"
"Because the teachers will fight this like everything after Gutenberg, with teeth and claws."
"At our local public school, kids receive more political/social education than actual knowledge."
"With the creation of the Dept. of Education to legislate education from as far from the classroom as possible, traditional schooling died. It used to be that children were taught to think critically and be agile-minded problem-solvers. But, agile thinking leads to the discovery that some students are better at it than others. That all changed with the Dept. of Ed's mission to make everyone the same and abolish the differences between individual students - institutionalized denial that some kids are just smarter than others."
"It's national bankruptcy and high cost teachers that are going to reduce actual 3rd party instruction capacity. "
Well, OK, I'm willing to be convinced, or at least open to seeing new information. Please show me 'Many studies that show the opposite to be true'.
Even if what you say is true, I still will say that 'abysmal results of public education' is a little unfair. The alternative to public education isn't everyone home-schooling their children, which is simply unrealistic. The alternative to public education isn't everyone paying for their own private education, which is also implausible. The only real alternative to public education, for everyone everywhere in America, is no education, and in comparison to that, I'm fairly sure public education's record, in this generation and previous ones, stands up pretty well.
Yes, hear hear! We homeschool as well! Also, I repair my own car - especially the brakes and the steering, which I'm especially good at. I provide doctoring and medical advice for my family as well - why go to some outside 'specialist' who may or may not be qualified in the subject. My daughter's appendectomy turned out especially well. Getting a surgeon for that is the path of least resistance and it's 'what's done'. We do our own prescription glasses also - bake them in the oven! It works great. Money is the only legitimate barrier for most people.
I'm sorry, but when I see arguments like those in the parent post, I see red. People home school for lots of reasons, but I object to the rationalization that goes on, that everyone who uses a public or private school is somehow less engaged or dodging responsibility. There's a tremendous body of study into child development, cognitive development, social development, theories of learning. Real, professional teachers should continue to learn and refine their professional practice, just as doctors, lawyers, and engineers do. The notion that I should just discard my own career, for which I may have spent several years or decades of study and specialization, to instead fake my way through teaching (at all grade levels) with a much lesser degree of knowledge and preparation, at the expense and risk of my own child's development and success, is just wrong for most people. It's exactly because I am an engaged and caring parent that I found a good public school and got my daughter in it.
A second thing I'm going to say is that it's very hard for a lot of home school kids to qualify for, or compete for, a lot of different kinds of secondary education and a lot of career fields. College admissions counselors are not going to see grades and recommendations written out by the child's own parents in the same light as other kinds of credentials. I had a friend who had a friend who approached me to ask how to get their home-schooled son some summer experience (I work in a kind of high-tech and academic situation) and the plain truth is that I couldn't offer anything to them. We have summer interns, and some other kinds of programs, and those are all pretty strongly competed for, among the local public schools. Those kinds of early experiences surely look good on college resumes.
That's just one anecdote, sure. But I think if you look around carefully and honestly, you will see that a lot of public schools are big enterprises now, with a lot of specialized teaching (technology, medicine, arts, the trades...). As a home-school parent, you might very well do a good job teacing fourth-grade geometry, but I think it would be a rare parent who could do a better job teaching (and preparing for what comes after high-school) every subject that a student might take a deeper interest in. Even in the rare case where that is true, the children in question are going to have an uphill battle getting into some kinds of post-secondary schools afterwards.
Statistics prove it! Also, I've read that Apple users have poor personal hygiene, poor grammar, and they tend to be poorer than Android users at sports involving any kinds of mittens or gloves. They have poor depth perception and have less tolerance to squeaky chalkboard noises. They are congenitally incapable of playing trombones, and as a class of people have flatter arches and more brittle cuticles than their non-walled-garden counterparts. SUCK IT apple-heads, revenge is suh-weeeeeee-et!
I'm sure it occurred to lots of people. Who brought it to market as a product, made it work on an available platform, committed the resources to it to scale it up and improve it over time, marketed it and sold it to people, stood by the product through some initial gaffes? Apple took a lot of risks, made an investment in something, working under the conviction that the market will reward real substantial improvements in the human-machine interface. (This is similar to how they worked through their productivity tools to make them usable on an iPad.) Where Google does those kinds of things, I applaud them as well.
(I really like, for instance, Gmail, Google Sketchup, Google docs. I'm not a zealot for one side or the other.)
Basically both companies are missing a big opportunity. Users, I'm fairly sure, would like to select from between a large cast of voices and personalities. You ought to be able do download a new one wirelessly from iTunes, say. Or maybe you'd like a kind of schizophrenic phone, with one kind of personality that reads the news to you, and a different one to nag you with pending to-do lists.
Yes, but Google didn't think to try to do this until Apple made it the primary feature of a new product. Apple continues to innovate the UI in big ways. I give Google a lot of credit for working towards a driverless car, but in several other instances recently, it seems they've either been following other companys' products, or killing their own development efforts right out from under fairly large groups of appreciative users.
Let me just try that out - hold on;
Me: What could be a huge market for tablet devices which utilize native handwriting recognition and run industry standard software?
Siri: I found 7 industry standards... 3 of them are not far from you: [...]
Me: No, no, Siri, listen, I need a huge market for tablet devices which utilize native handrwriting recognition!
Siri: The Ojibwa and Tuskarora Iroquois are recognized Native American tribes near your location.
Me: Siri, are you dumb? I am looking for a huge market for tablet devices which utilize native handrwriting recognition!
Siri: I found 5 markets for tablets are near your location. Tap the one you want directions to: