The vast majority of people who used a Windows PC because it was the only way to do basic things like web, email and simple word processing or data entry never really needed one. Those people will now move to something else, since at long last there actually IS something else other than a Mac that cost about twice as much as was still almost as complicated.
But there are those who DO need a PC. As they realize that Windows 8 isn't a PC operating system anymore they have a choice to make. Suck it up and try to keep using it because of the legacy app problem, move to a Mac or try Linux. (For the people I'm talking about it is probably, try Linux.... again.)
Linux blew the opportunity offered by the Vista fiasco by having most popular distros all but unusable during that period due to the PulseAudio debacle. And now when we get a redo every major distro is as deeply into "Tablet Madness" as Microsoft. We just can't win. Only consolation is Apple is ALSO terrifying their own user base with the increasing iOS creep into OS X. Option #4 anyone? What would it be though?
Exactly my point. Right now you could easilly walk around with blocks like:
Billboard Pop Charts - ALL Billboard R&B/Soul/etc - ALL Billboard Country - ALL And so on.
With "ALL" defined at first as the Top 100 chart for every year since they made a chart. You can do that now, the Pop chart will fit on a 32GB MicroSD card. Soon every song that charted, period. A little later every album from a major label that charted. Then every album from a major label, period. It is coming. Inexorable, unstoppable. And with video just a couple of generations behind. And once the back catalog is on everyone's device keeping up with new content is easy enough. It could be done. It would drive sales of storage at a time when little else seems to be enticing people to move beyond the fairly small sizes available today.
Cutting off the pirates' oxygen supply will help with the bigger outlaw commercial operators. But it won't faze ThePirateBay in the least. Until somebody can come up with a solution to that one, the problem isn't likely to get solved. Longer term though, the bandwidth caps are going to do more to curb the problem on the Internet than anything law enforcement could ever do.
Eventually we will rediscover the bandwidth of sneakernet. Not much to be done about that one. And it gets worse.
Ponder this one 'content industry'... How much storage would it take to store every popular song? How easy is it to pass that around? All somebody needs to add is a P2P phone app that works over WiFi to continually sync new songs in as people socialize. Poisoning might be a problem but hashes can resist that. Somebody really serious about peeing in the industry's corn flake could solve the problems and post 'an app for that.' We are getting close to carrying around enough storage so that every kid could just expect to have 'everything' ever released on a major label sitting in their mobile device. Just a few more turns of Moore's Law. How much longer until the same thing happens with TV & movies? Forget the cloud and monthly fees or paying by the minute, just have every movie or tv show ever made riding around on every phone.
> The cheap ones are a nice way to add a network media player to a TV.
Except they aren't. One USB port, no network port and no BT. So no access to mass media AND an input device without a hub and there goes the entire justification of it being so small and after you get done cheap is probably done for as well.
Spend a little more. There are some very interesting Android 4.0 based media player dedicated units for under a hundred. They are designed as a STB, come with a remote control, etc. One I saw even had a slot on top to stick in a 2.5" SATA drive in a little plastic housing. Thing stuck up like an old Nintendo or Atart cart. I hear they sell drives on the streets in China preloaded with bootleg media which makes it a real win if you happen to live there I guess.
I get the meme, it is a classis around here. This is different. There was a market for music players, the debate over the iPod was whether that product had what it took to dominate that new market.
The problem here is these are products looking for a market. We have seen this a lot, somebody puts some kewl tech together and markets on the sole basis that it is a kewl gadget that people will do unspecified kewl things with. The surplus markets are saturated with the remainders.
To sell something you have to have a solution to a problem, even if it was a problem people didn't realize they had before the product appeared.
Yes, a Mac is POSIX certified. I know that. A Mac isn't typically included in the phrase 'iProduct' even though some Mac products have the 'i' like the iBook and iMac, do they still even make those anymore?
And no iPad will ever have a CLI because that would violate a fundamental principle, Thou Shalt Not Program an iProduct. Only official apps may run on one. Creation is not allowed, only consumption. Not a computer, consumer electronics.
All that Chrome does is move the problem somewhere else.
Exactly like a VT102, an X Term or a Windows RDP Client.
If all a user needs is a preconfigured system administered by someone else, a remote desktop is a good solution to support. But they are not without their own problems either.
At work my users are on fat clients with network homes though because it outperforms any remote display tech I have ever seen. They rarely need a command line though. However I wouldn't dream of creating that environment for them without one though.
That said, there are a few places where I haven't bothered to totally automate away the CLI. Have yet to encounter a user who can't click the icon in the GNOME menu to open a terminal and type a simple command. Yea if there are options beyond a filename or wierd punctuation all bets are off for most of them so they will probably never become bash jockeys. That is why I automate just about anything. On the other hand we have some stalwarts who learned vi on SCO Xenix before I came and they still turn to vim for some things, something I of course encourage and ensure works.
> Smart phones, DVR's, etc. Those all seem to be just fine for the end-user without a command line.
What do those things have in common? Consumer electronics. They are all locked devices with only the limited configurable items the manufacturer wanted you to have. Other than a smart phone which will be basically that for the bulk of owners, for the select they will be jailbroken and converted into little PCs.
A PC is not a DVD player. A PC is a lever for the mind, thus I don't really consider anyone computer literate who can't write a short program. After all, while we don't expect the average person to write a novel or even a press release, we do include the ability to compose a few short paragraphs of readable text in the definition of English literacy.
Getting the illiterate moved to Android or iProducts will be a net win since they will then stop exerting undue market influence on dumbing down computers because, illiterate as they might be, as militantly proud of their illiteracy as all too many are, they had to use one until recently to have acces to the most basic word processing, email and web access.
Um. Guess you have never batch edited with ImageMagick then? All depends what sort of edits need to be made to how many files which tool is easier to use.
And even if I'm going to use GIMP I'm more likely to launch it from a bash prompt than futz with a graphical file browser. Launching it from the menu would mean browsing down to the right place but if you say "gimp filename" you avoid all that.
Basically the whole eliminate the CLI thing is a very old argument. It boils down to the problem of putting PCs in the hands of people who have no business with one. In that respect the iProducts and Android are a wonder. We get rid of the media consumers and game players, leaving the people who actually use a PC as a mind expansion. And we can deal with verbal communications just fine, we don't have to have pictures unless we are processing visual information in ways that require a visual medium.
> I guess the Democratic affiliation of Ed Koch and Abe Beame are just figments of my imagination.
No, but the political scene changed after that. Now Democratic politics, internal and external, are almost entirely based on dividing people into tribes by race, gender, etc. and voting along those lines.
It was actually somewhat suprising when Mark Greene won the primary to run against Bloomy that first time. It had been assumed by 'all knowledgable pundits' that it would be a fight between a black and a hispanic in the runoff. So since all the local experts were wrong (as is so often the case) you could argue that Bloomberg could have actually won as a D. Seems Democratic party politics wasn't quite as race obsessed as the experts thought. But that wasn't they way he bet and he won anyway so it is nothing but an interesting historical footnote. Of course there are other details to consider, by running as an R he didn't have to spend much on the primary and could avoid the pandering to the base required to secure the nomination, making the win in the general a lot simpler since he didn't have to weasel out of those positions.
> I guess this is one company to add to my blacklist...
Cisco has been on mine for over a decade. Linksys wasn't until today, even after Cisco bought them out.
Seriously, name me another software company that refuses security and critical bug fixes without an ongoing service contract? NO fracking way. Had a couple of their products donated by the Gates Foundation, great reliable hardware. Odd, usable but baroque configuration system. But anything you want to connect to or insert into one is priced like they were a defense contractor and the company itself is horrid. So of course 'everyone' uses their stuff. Intelligent life in space? How 'bout we search for Earthly Intelligence first, K?
Progress is not an end, it is a means at best. Progress to WHAT is the right question. And to Progressives it is the same sunny uplands of history that Stalin and Mao have already littered with corpses. Only difference is, as Jonah Goldberg observed in _LIberal Fascism_, that American progressives want to do it quietly, sneaky, with a smiley face instead of a rifle butt to the head.
Progress implies there is but one way, Forward! Which is of course intentional.
Let us instead debate the various possible futures and choose one. I will argue for one with more personal freedom and personal responsibility at the expense of less security. Let others argue for trading liberty for security and we shall see if the government schools have erased all memory of a certain Founding Father's opinon of that trade.
> sorry but concepts like good and evil are subjective..
Wow, did you figure that all by yourself? Educated in a government school, right? Because forget critical thinking until you get that reading comprehension thing down cold. (See, ya twits upthread? THIS is what an ad hominum attack/bitchslap looks like. Learn the difference and when to use one for comedic effect.)
I said people with a fudged up moral compass more often than not declare whatever way it points as 'good' and the opposite as 'evil'. That implies I'm both familiar with moral relativism and that I reject it. I'd guess you are one of the ones with a fudged up one, am I right?
Because there ARE absolutes. Not saying we can, with 100% certainty, declare all of them or even most of them at this point in our philosophical development; not there IS objective good and evil.
We know murder is wrong. Co-existence with any person or group that fails to agree on that point is not possible so we are forced to accept it as a pre condition in any moral code involving multiple people. Note I said murder, look it up before you open yer trap and say something stupid.
Most of the 'deadly sins' are wrong for reasons which should be deducable from similar basic axioms of morality by anyone willing to expend the effort. From that we can conclude that liberalism/progressivism/socialism/whatever it calls itself today is also wrong since it is based on declaring envy a virtue and murder goes hand in hand with it.
> Could you please document the GOP's resistance and opposition to the Tea Party's extremisc positions?
Easy. They managed to cram Mitt Romney down our throats didn't they? They f*ck*ng handed Obama a second term on a silver platter rather than allow one of the more electable, but uncontrollable, candidates to get the nomination. Romney can not win. On the other hand Obama is working really hard to lose right now so we could at least get stalemate for four years.
He was a Democrat in NYC his entire life; right up until he wanted to run for mayor and hit the cold hard reality that as a Jew he had zero chance of winning as a D in that city and suddenly became a Republican. Which he remained until he won and then became an 'Independent' Nanny State progressive.
Nope. Put down your cleansed history book and go hit archives of period popular publications. American Progressives, European Fascists and Russian Communists were birds of a feather. They had a heck of a mutual admiration society going on, swapping ideas and such both ways. Hitler learned the new art of Propaganda from an American Progressive, just to pick one example. Bet you didn't learn that little fact in school now did ya? When you really start to read up on it is actually hard to see exactly what WWII was fought for since FDR, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini seemed to agree on pretty much everything except who would be the ultimate ruler of the glorious future.
Now, ready to really have your mind blown open? Google can show you the Nazi Party's Platform you know. Care to guess how many planks are virtually indistinguishable from similar ones in Democratic Party Platforms of then or now? Do you dare go count them for yourself? Go, prove me wrong! Come back and denounce me for a lying liar who lies. I must warn you, you won't like what you find.
Shows how little you know about Libertarians or Libertarianism. Gather a dozen Libertarians and try to get them to agree on anything of substance. Oh, they will mostly agree that the FED is bad, drugs are good and unimportant things like that but they disagree on almost everthing else. Which points up their problem, it is an incomplete philosophy. It hasn't developed all the details of how you actually could organize a society without a recognizable government. Pin one down and make them explain how you deal with corner cases and you get insanity, the smarter ones will admit the problem but the diehards are hilarious as they twist reality into knots.
Personally I believe (and admit it is just an irrational emotional belief) that the future does lie in that direction, we just need another couple of great thinkers to solve some of the gaps in the theory. That more liberty is better than less. Kinda like the current state of physics, we all know in our gut there is a theory of everything out there and we are probably on the right basic track... but until we get another Newton or Einstein we can't know for sure and the current state of things is a disaster.
Yes. You see there are parts of Texas where wind farming might actually be profitable someday. So of course the greens went right to work finding a mascot to rally around to stop any such notion. Cue the Dune Sagebrush Lizard.
With progressives it is never what they say in public that should be considered, but what they say when they don't think anyone else is listening to some boring CSPAN crap. It isn't about alternative energy, it is about forcing people to use LESS energy, period. So a successful 'alternative' source is just as bad a coal from their perspective.
> Radical new methods like teaching kids to read and be numerate, or did you mean the 1980s and 90s rather than the 1880s and 90s?
It is generally accepted practice to assume the pivot date on a two digit year to be closest to the time of the writing.
But actually.... if you want to go there... if you were to go to a museum or read a book or something you might learn something shocking. Something that would probably rock the foundations of your belief system. A great percentage of Americans in the 1800's were literate, especially if they weren't simple laborers, slaves (actual or recently freed) etc. The safe money would be on you having a greater chance of finding someone in a middle class pub in 1800 Boston who could write a literate paragraph then than you would in a high school class of today.
They didn't have any of the things we believe are 'essential' to education today but they had better results. Exclude those who never attended school and there wouldn't be much debate as to which group of randomly selected twenty year old citizens were better educated in a comparison between any decade of the 19th Century and 2012. We have vast advantages in wealth and knowledge and are getting an inferior result. Does that make sense? The schools are either epic incompetent or operating as designed by the progressives who instituted mandatory government education. Pick one or provide an alternate explanation for the observed phenomena.
> just because one stupid wave of "progressives" was wrong, no progressive approach is possible
Guilty as charged. Progressivism/Socialism/Fascism/Communism/etc; all branches of the same diseased tree. They have a track record going back at least a hundred years now, some would say all the way back to the French Revolution. I happen to believe we have seen enough now to pass judgement on it. It doesn't work, hasn't ever worked and probably can't ever be made to work. It is a defective philosophy based on wicked and unworkable core ideas. If you disagree please tell me what body count YOU define as 'the line', for me a hundred million is enough.
> You still haven't pointed out how having critical thinking skills is wrong for a student.
And you won't see me do something that dumb. But remember, when progressives speak they aren't speaking English; they are using NewSpeak. When they speak of 'fairness' it isn't, 'critical thinking' is almost exactly the opposite between English and NewSpeak. The idea isn't for the student to be able to reason, use logic and such. It is nothing more than sophistry, bullying and abuse of positions of authority to ensure the erasure of any moral code learned at home and retraining in being a good Democrat pet.
For proof go visit any bastion of the left. No thought at any of them, only emotions and mindless regurgitation of the Party line. Combine with the inability of schools to even teach basic literacy since the progressives took over and only a fool would think it a good idea for the schools to even try teaching philosophy and logic in their current state.
No, I used to believe like you still do, that they are just ignorant. I no longer do. I now believe many of them are truly evil. They read 1984 and saw an instruction manual for how to reorder a society instead of a warning.
Remember, Dr. Evil is funny because he admits being a villian, that almost never actually happens. No, people with totally fudged up inverted moral compasses convince themselves that the wicked things they desire are not wicked, nay they are good and desirable things. Do you wonder why they keep calling us evil for believing in the traditional values of Western Civ? Usually we shrug it off as hyperbole. I submit that it isn't. That their moral compasses are so twisted that when viewed from their p.o.v. we truly ARE evil. The converse of course is also true, as it by definition must be. Not pleasant thoughts, but there they are on an otherwise terrible day for liberty.
I get this all the time. The definition of 'troll' seems to be 'anyone disagreeing with progressives' except it is also used on occasion to mod down the GNAA and other crap. Kinda like 'racist' now includes 'anyone winning an argument with a progressive' along with the traditional meaning of 'Democrat stalwarts like Exalted Cyclops and US Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), Jim Crow, Googe Wallace, et al.'
I consider it an honor to be downmodded by the narrow minded intolerant twits.
This is a very old argument. The/. summary links to but doesn't actually quote the platform. Allow me:
"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Now go hit the 'ol Wikipedia on "Outcome Based Education".... I'll wait. For the impatient I'll summarize: This is just a re-run of the long running battles in the late '80s and early '90s over new age teaching methods/using our teachers and kids as lab animals to try radical 'progressive' new ideas in teaching how to be a good progressive doubleplus good thinker that knows everything about stopping mom from putting the trash in the wrong recycling bin but can't locate the US on a map or tell you who George Washington was.
Having read all that, if you still can't figure out why Republicans would be against it you are simply too closed minded since you shouldn't be ignorant anymore. You don't have to agree with their opposition but you should be able to understand they aren't totally off the rails either.
We have a crisis in K-12 education where most kids are graduating barely able to send a mangled SMS; 'progressive' experiments that require huge infusions of new money in a recession should be at the bottom of anyone's list in the current environment. We know how to teach Reading, Writing and Math. We have successfully done that in classroom environments most readers here would consider primitive. Get the basics right, then come talk to me about experimenting.
We KNOW what is going to happen if you let a bunch of lefty trolls loose indoctrinating K-12 kids on 'critical thinking' because we have seen it already in the colleges. Nowhere else do you find such an intolerant monoculture as the tenured elite in their ivory towers.
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The vast majority of people who used a Windows PC because it was the only way to do basic things like web, email and simple word processing or data entry never really needed one. Those people will now move to something else, since at long last there actually IS something else other than a Mac that cost about twice as much as was still almost as complicated.
But there are those who DO need a PC. As they realize that Windows 8 isn't a PC operating system anymore they have a choice to make. Suck it up and try to keep using it because of the legacy app problem, move to a Mac or try Linux. (For the people I'm talking about it is probably, try Linux.... again.)
Linux blew the opportunity offered by the Vista fiasco by having most popular distros all but unusable during that period due to the PulseAudio debacle. And now when we get a redo every major distro is as deeply into "Tablet Madness" as Microsoft. We just can't win. Only consolation is Apple is ALSO terrifying their own user base with the increasing iOS creep into OS X. Option #4 anyone? What would it be though?
Exactly my point. Right now you could easilly walk around with blocks like:
Billboard Pop Charts - ALL
Billboard R&B/Soul/etc - ALL
Billboard Country - ALL
And so on.
With "ALL" defined at first as the Top 100 chart for every year since they made a chart. You can do that now, the Pop chart will fit on a 32GB MicroSD card. Soon every song that charted, period. A little later every album from a major label that charted. Then every album from a major label, period. It is coming. Inexorable, unstoppable. And with video just a couple of generations behind. And once the back catalog is on everyone's device keeping up with new content is easy enough. It could be done. It would drive sales of storage at a time when little else seems to be enticing people to move beyond the fairly small sizes available today.
Cutting off the pirates' oxygen supply will help with the bigger outlaw commercial operators. But it won't faze ThePirateBay in the least. Until somebody can come up with a solution to that one, the problem isn't likely to get solved. Longer term though, the bandwidth caps are going to do more to curb the problem on the Internet than anything law enforcement could ever do.
Eventually we will rediscover the bandwidth of sneakernet. Not much to be done about that one. And it gets worse.
Ponder this one 'content industry'... How much storage would it take to store every popular song? How easy is it to pass that around? All somebody needs to add is a P2P phone app that works over WiFi to continually sync new songs in as people socialize. Poisoning might be a problem but hashes can resist that. Somebody really serious about peeing in the industry's corn flake could solve the problems and post 'an app for that.' We are getting close to carrying around enough storage so that every kid could just expect to have 'everything' ever released on a major label sitting in their mobile device. Just a few more turns of Moore's Law. How much longer until the same thing happens with TV & movies? Forget the cloud and monthly fees or paying by the minute, just have every movie or tv show ever made riding around on every phone.
> The cheap ones are a nice way to add a network media player to a TV.
Except they aren't. One USB port, no network port and no BT. So no access to mass media AND an input device without a hub and there goes the entire justification of it being so small and after you get done cheap is probably done for as well.
Spend a little more. There are some very interesting Android 4.0 based media player dedicated units for under a hundred. They are designed as a STB, come with a remote control, etc. One I saw even had a slot on top to stick in a 2.5" SATA drive in a little plastic housing. Thing stuck up like an old Nintendo or Atart cart. I hear they sell drives on the streets in China preloaded with bootleg media which makes it a real win if you happen to live there I guess.
I get the meme, it is a classis around here. This is different. There was a market for music players, the debate over the iPod was whether that product had what it took to dominate that new market.
The problem here is these are products looking for a market. We have seen this a lot, somebody puts some kewl tech together and markets on the sole basis that it is a kewl gadget that people will do unspecified kewl things with. The surplus markets are saturated with the remainders.
To sell something you have to have a solution to a problem, even if it was a problem people didn't realize they had before the product appeared.
It is similar to the crappy little $75 Android on a sticks all over the sites like Alibaba with the following differences:
1. Built in power supply and audio amp. Audio out on TOS-Link along with the amp and over HDMI.
2. Dual core CPU. And only some of the cheapos come with 1GB of ram, most only give 512.
3. Cool housing with lots of LEDs. Because what nerd can resist a crapload of leds, amiright?
4. Less able to actually run android apps.
5. No MicroSD on the Q. Seems to be a trend, note that their new tablet also lacks expansion ability. Tethered media consumption device.
6. The Q gets Bluetooth, the cheapos don't.
7. 10/100 Ethernet on the Q.
8. About four times as expensive.
Things that they have in common:
1. No clearly defined reason to buy one.
> Now now, I use iProducts and a Mac
Yes, a Mac is POSIX certified. I know that. A Mac isn't typically included in the phrase 'iProduct' even though some Mac products have the 'i' like the iBook and iMac, do they still even make those anymore?
And no iPad will ever have a CLI because that would violate a fundamental principle, Thou Shalt Not Program an iProduct. Only official apps may run on one. Creation is not allowed, only consumption. Not a computer, consumer electronics.
All that Chrome does is move the problem somewhere else.
Exactly like a VT102, an X Term or a Windows RDP Client.
If all a user needs is a preconfigured system administered by someone else, a remote desktop is a good solution to support. But they are not without their own problems either.
At work my users are on fat clients with network homes though because it outperforms any remote display tech I have ever seen. They rarely need a command line though. However I wouldn't dream of creating that environment for them without one though.
That said, there are a few places where I haven't bothered to totally automate away the CLI. Have yet to encounter a user who can't click the icon in the GNOME menu to open a terminal and type a simple command. Yea if there are options beyond a filename or wierd punctuation all bets are off for most of them so they will probably never become bash jockeys. That is why I automate just about anything. On the other hand we have some stalwarts who learned vi on SCO Xenix before I came and they still turn to vim for some things, something I of course encourage and ensure works.
> Smart phones, DVR's, etc. Those all seem to be just fine for the end-user without a command line.
What do those things have in common? Consumer electronics. They are all locked devices with only the limited configurable items the manufacturer wanted you to have. Other than a smart phone which will be basically that for the bulk of owners, for the select they will be jailbroken and converted into little PCs.
A PC is not a DVD player. A PC is a lever for the mind, thus I don't really consider anyone computer literate who can't write a short program. After all, while we don't expect the average person to write a novel or even a press release, we do include the ability to compose a few short paragraphs of readable text in the definition of English literacy.
Getting the illiterate moved to Android or iProducts will be a net win since they will then stop exerting undue market influence on dumbing down computers because, illiterate as they might be, as militantly proud of their illiteracy as all too many are, they had to use one until recently to have acces to the most basic word processing, email and web access.
Um. Guess you have never batch edited with ImageMagick then? All depends what sort of edits need to be made to how many files which tool is easier to use.
And even if I'm going to use GIMP I'm more likely to launch it from a bash prompt than futz with a graphical file browser. Launching it from the menu would mean browsing down to the right place but if you say "gimp filename" you avoid all that.
Basically the whole eliminate the CLI thing is a very old argument. It boils down to the problem of putting PCs in the hands of people who have no business with one. In that respect the iProducts and Android are a wonder. We get rid of the media consumers and game players, leaving the people who actually use a PC as a mind expansion. And we can deal with verbal communications just fine, we don't have to have pictures unless we are processing visual information in ways that require a visual medium.
> I guess the Democratic affiliation of Ed Koch and Abe Beame are just figments of my imagination.
No, but the political scene changed after that. Now Democratic politics, internal and external, are almost entirely based on dividing people into tribes by race, gender, etc. and voting along those lines.
It was actually somewhat suprising when Mark Greene won the primary to run against Bloomy that first time. It had been assumed by 'all knowledgable pundits' that it would be a fight between a black and a hispanic in the runoff. So since all the local experts were wrong (as is so often the case) you could argue that Bloomberg could have actually won as a D. Seems Democratic party politics wasn't quite as race obsessed as the experts thought. But that wasn't they way he bet and he won anyway so it is nothing but an interesting historical footnote. Of course there are other details to consider, by running as an R he didn't have to spend much on the primary and could avoid the pandering to the base required to secure the nomination, making the win in the general a lot simpler since he didn't have to weasel out of those positions.
> I guess this is one company to add to my blacklist...
Cisco has been on mine for over a decade. Linksys wasn't until today, even after Cisco bought them out.
Seriously, name me another software company that refuses security and critical bug fixes without an ongoing service contract? NO fracking way. Had a couple of their products donated by the Gates Foundation, great reliable hardware. Odd, usable but baroque configuration system. But anything you want to connect to or insert into one is priced like they were a defense contractor and the company itself is horrid. So of course 'everyone' uses their stuff. Intelligent life in space? How 'bout we search for Earthly Intelligence first, K?
> And since when is progress a bad thing?
Progress is not an end, it is a means at best. Progress to WHAT is the right question. And to Progressives it is the same sunny uplands of history that Stalin and Mao have already littered with corpses. Only difference is, as Jonah Goldberg observed in _LIberal Fascism_, that American progressives want to do it quietly, sneaky, with a smiley face instead of a rifle butt to the head.
Progress implies there is but one way, Forward! Which is of course intentional.
Let us instead debate the various possible futures and choose one. I will argue for one with more personal freedom and personal responsibility at the expense of less security. Let others argue for trading liberty for security and we shall see if the government schools have erased all memory of a certain Founding Father's opinon of that trade.
> sorry but concepts like good and evil are subjective..
Wow, did you figure that all by yourself? Educated in a government school, right? Because forget critical thinking until you get that reading comprehension thing down cold. (See, ya twits upthread? THIS is what an ad hominum attack/bitchslap looks like. Learn the difference and when to use one for comedic effect.)
I said people with a fudged up moral compass more often than not declare whatever way it points as 'good' and the opposite as 'evil'. That implies I'm both familiar with moral relativism and that I reject it. I'd guess you are one of the ones with a fudged up one, am I right?
Because there ARE absolutes. Not saying we can, with 100% certainty, declare all of them or even most of them at this point in our philosophical development; not there IS objective good and evil.
We know murder is wrong. Co-existence with any person or group that fails to agree on that point is not possible so we are forced to accept it as a pre condition in any moral code involving multiple people. Note I said murder, look it up before you open yer trap and say something stupid.
Most of the 'deadly sins' are wrong for reasons which should be deducable from similar basic axioms of morality by anyone willing to expend the effort. From that we can conclude that liberalism/progressivism/socialism/whatever it calls itself today is also wrong since it is based on declaring envy a virtue and murder goes hand in hand with it.
> Could you please document the GOP's resistance and opposition to the Tea Party's extremisc positions?
Easy. They managed to cram Mitt Romney down our throats didn't they? They f*ck*ng handed Obama a second term on a silver platter rather than allow one of the more electable, but uncontrollable, candidates to get the nomination. Romney can not win. On the other hand Obama is working really hard to lose right now so we could at least get stalemate for four years.
> And since when was Michael Bloomberg a liberal?
He was a Democrat in NYC his entire life; right up until he wanted to run for mayor and hit the cold hard reality that as a Jew he had zero chance of winning as a D in that city and suddenly became a Republican. Which he remained until he won and then became an 'Independent' Nanny State progressive.
> Fascism is a conservative strategy.
Nope. Put down your cleansed history book and go hit archives of period popular publications. American Progressives, European Fascists and Russian Communists were birds of a feather. They had a heck of a mutual admiration society going on, swapping ideas and such both ways. Hitler learned the new art of Propaganda from an American Progressive, just to pick one example. Bet you didn't learn that little fact in school now did ya? When you really start to read up on it is actually hard to see exactly what WWII was fought for since FDR, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini seemed to agree on pretty much everything except who would be the ultimate ruler of the glorious future.
Now, ready to really have your mind blown open? Google can show you the Nazi Party's Platform you know. Care to guess how many planks are virtually indistinguishable from similar ones in Democratic Party Platforms of then or now? Do you dare go count them for yourself? Go, prove me wrong! Come back and denounce me for a lying liar who lies. I must warn you, you won't like what you find.
> Wait... what about Libertarians on \ ???
Shows how little you know about Libertarians or Libertarianism. Gather a dozen Libertarians and try to get them to agree on anything of substance. Oh, they will mostly agree that the FED is bad, drugs are good and unimportant things like that but they disagree on almost everthing else. Which points up their problem, it is an incomplete philosophy. It hasn't developed all the details of how you actually could organize a society without a recognizable government. Pin one down and make them explain how you deal with corner cases and you get insanity, the smarter ones will admit the problem but the diehards are hilarious as they twist reality into knots.
Personally I believe (and admit it is just an irrational emotional belief) that the future does lie in that direction, we just need another couple of great thinkers to solve some of the gaps in the theory. That more liberty is better than less. Kinda like the current state of physics, we all know in our gut there is a theory of everything out there and we are probably on the right basic track... but until we get another Newton or Einstein we can't know for sure and the current state of things is a disaster.
Yes. You see there are parts of Texas where wind farming might actually be profitable someday. So of course the greens went right to work finding a mascot to rally around to stop any such notion. Cue the Dune Sagebrush Lizard.
With progressives it is never what they say in public that should be considered, but what they say when they don't think anyone else is listening to some boring CSPAN crap. It isn't about alternative energy, it is about forcing people to use LESS energy, period. So a successful 'alternative' source is just as bad a coal from their perspective.
> Radical new methods like teaching kids to read and be numerate, or did you mean the 1980s and 90s rather than the 1880s and 90s?
It is generally accepted practice to assume the pivot date on a two digit year to be closest to the time of the writing.
But actually.... if you want to go there... if you were to go to a museum or read a book or something you might learn something shocking. Something that would probably rock the foundations of your belief system. A great percentage of Americans in the 1800's were literate, especially if they weren't simple laborers, slaves (actual or recently freed) etc. The safe money would be on you having a greater chance of finding someone in a middle class pub in 1800 Boston who could write a literate paragraph then than you would in a high school class of today.
They didn't have any of the things we believe are 'essential' to education today but they had better results. Exclude those who never attended school and there wouldn't be much debate as to which group of randomly selected twenty year old citizens were better educated in a comparison between any decade of the 19th Century and 2012. We have vast advantages in wealth and knowledge and are getting an inferior result. Does that make sense? The schools are either epic incompetent or operating as designed by the progressives who instituted mandatory government education. Pick one or provide an alternate explanation for the observed phenomena.
> just because one stupid wave of "progressives" was wrong, no progressive approach is possible
Guilty as charged. Progressivism/Socialism/Fascism/Communism/etc; all branches of the same diseased tree. They have a track record going back at least a hundred years now, some would say all the way back to the French Revolution. I happen to believe we have seen enough now to pass judgement on it. It doesn't work, hasn't ever worked and probably can't ever be made to work. It is a defective philosophy based on wicked and unworkable core ideas. If you disagree please tell me what body count YOU define as 'the line', for me a hundred million is enough.
> You still haven't pointed out how having critical thinking skills is wrong for a student.
And you won't see me do something that dumb. But remember, when progressives speak they aren't speaking English; they are using NewSpeak. When they speak of 'fairness' it isn't, 'critical thinking' is almost exactly the opposite between English and NewSpeak. The idea isn't for the student to be able to reason, use logic and such. It is nothing more than sophistry, bullying and abuse of positions of authority to ensure the erasure of any moral code learned at home and retraining in being a good Democrat pet.
For proof go visit any bastion of the left. No thought at any of them, only emotions and mindless regurgitation of the Party line. Combine with the inability of schools to even teach basic literacy since the progressives took over and only a fool would think it a good idea for the schools to even try teaching philosophy and logic in their current state.
> I mean, you're argument almost always have come down to ad hom attacks.
I think you meant ad hominem but since it does not apply I'm not sure.
No, I used to believe like you still do, that they are just ignorant. I no longer do. I now believe many of them are truly evil. They read 1984 and saw an instruction manual for how to reorder a society instead of a warning.
Remember, Dr. Evil is funny because he admits being a villian, that almost never actually happens. No, people with totally fudged up inverted moral compasses convince themselves that the wicked things they desire are not wicked, nay they are good and desirable things. Do you wonder why they keep calling us evil for believing in the traditional values of Western Civ? Usually we shrug it off as hyperbole. I submit that it isn't. That their moral compasses are so twisted that when viewed from their p.o.v. we truly ARE evil. The converse of course is also true, as it by definition must be. Not pleasant thoughts, but there they are on an otherwise terrible day for liberty.
> How is this in any way trolling ?
I get this all the time. The definition of 'troll' seems to be 'anyone disagreeing with progressives' except it is also used on occasion to mod down the GNAA and other crap. Kinda like 'racist' now includes 'anyone winning an argument with a progressive' along with the traditional meaning of 'Democrat stalwarts like Exalted Cyclops and US Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), Jim Crow, Googe Wallace, et al.'
I consider it an honor to be downmodded by the narrow minded intolerant twits.
This is a very old argument. The /. summary links to but doesn't actually quote the platform. Allow me:
"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Now go hit the 'ol Wikipedia on "Outcome Based Education".... I'll wait. For the impatient I'll summarize: This is just a re-run of the long running battles in the late '80s and early '90s over new age teaching methods/using our teachers and kids as lab animals to try radical 'progressive' new ideas in teaching how to be a good progressive doubleplus good thinker that knows everything about stopping mom from putting the trash in the wrong recycling bin but can't locate the US on a map or tell you who George Washington was.
Having read all that, if you still can't figure out why Republicans would be against it you are simply too closed minded since you shouldn't be ignorant anymore. You don't have to agree with their opposition but you should be able to understand they aren't totally off the rails either.
We have a crisis in K-12 education where most kids are graduating barely able to send a mangled SMS; 'progressive' experiments that require huge infusions of new money in a recession should be at the bottom of anyone's list in the current environment. We know how to teach Reading, Writing and Math. We have successfully done that in classroom environments most readers here would consider primitive. Get the basics right, then come talk to me about experimenting.
We KNOW what is going to happen if you let a bunch of lefty trolls loose indoctrinating K-12 kids on 'critical thinking' because we have seen it already in the colleges. Nowhere else do you find such an intolerant monoculture as the tenured elite in their ivory towers.