> Coke, tobacco companies, pepsi, johnson and johnson... Stop spreading > neo-con bullshit.
Ok, I'll give you Coke (incorporated around 1893), they certainly don't look like they are going anywhere soon and have tentacles everywhere. But Pepsico isn't that old (incorporated 1903: i.e. 20th Century) and big tobacco will be dead and buried in another decade or so. J&J was founded in 1887 so ok, it qualifies as late 19th century and is still fairly strong. No rule is absolute, I'm looking at the general trends and there just aren't very many 100+ year old corporations and even fewer that hit 150. At some point stupidity sets in, they stumble and get picked off. Corporations are mortal it seems.
But I figured somebody would bring up Proctor & Gamble founded fifty years earlier in 1837. They seem to have dug themselves into a nice boring market niche and damned if can see how anybody is going to blast em out it.
> where they inevitably fail, costing the economy millions.
Condemn her if you want, I rejoice in her stupidity as confirmation of evolution in action. For all those who fear the huge soulless corporations, let her be an object lesson. If we can get the government out of the business of propping them up, most of those corporations can't survive the loss of their founder by more than 10-20 years. Small nimble companies are much better adapted to serving the customer.
Think about it. how many 19th century corporations still exist here at the open of the 21st? Not many and none anywhere the prime of their strength. Some of the once great rail corporations lumber along. Sears barely limped into the 21st as an example of walking dead, only to be bought out by the bond ghouls who leveraged ownership of K-Mart out of bankruptcy court. Doesn't matter, the world has moved on and it is Walmart's day now. But Sam Walton is dead and their day will soon pass.
HP didn't long survive Hewlet & Packard's exit. And neither will Microsoft survive Gates and Balmer's retirement as anything like what they are now. Too big to outright fail, too impotent to matter anymore. Sometimes a large zombie corporation falls under control of a new leader and revives for a time, see IBM. But again, the leader moves on and the decline begins anew.
> Why is Salt Lake City funding the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents? > They're in england!
Well a sig does have a fairly short limit, and I'm old school and wouldn't ever go over 72 chars anyway.
SLC is the Schools and Librarys Corp, a psuedo government corporation that suckles at the the teat created by the line item on your phone bill called "Universal Service Fund". It dispenses money to schools and libraries to subsidize their Internet connection.... with more strings than Pinocchio. One of the nastier ones being CIPA.
CIPA is the Child Internet Protection Act. It, like most big government programs tend to, 'protects' the children by the simple expedient of infantalizing everyone. Filtering children's Internet access is a no brainer, something we were doing years before the feds rediscovered the Internet. But we did it in a sensible way, considering the limitations of the tech. We had a filter. Then we didn't allow minors to access the Internet at ALL without a parental consent form, because the net is a dangerous place even with a filter. The parent could set their preferred level of access for each child, well by library card actually. They could pick from:
1. No access at all
2. Access only when accompanied by them.
3. Filtered
4. Unfiltered.
Here in rural Louisiana, buckle of the bible belt, a fair number of parents picked unfiltered for older teens. Then Great White Father in Washington overrulled them, declaring nobody would receive unfiltered access by default and only those over 18 could even put in a per session request for unfiltered. Period, end of discussion.
In the areas where cable is available, DSL also tends to be available. And competitive. BellSouth is the government sponsored DSL monopoly competitor to Cox, the government sponsored Cable monopoly here. Cox currently offers a slightly faster connection in theory but no static IP. And of course I actually talked to a Cox rep. Sure they offer a 6mb down (unknown up) plan, but they only have 24mb serving the whole fscking city. Sign my ass up now! Of course I'd be the only iso scarfing file leech in town. I only have 3mb with BellSouth, but I actually get 3mb downloads on a routine basis. And for me, static IP is not something I'd be willing to trade off. I connect back to home from work as often as I connect to work from home. Sure you can kludge things to work with random IP, but it is so much better to just assign a name in a bind config file and forget it.
> No one really likes the command line... plenty of people get by with > it, but it's obviously the most primitive computer interface.
Speak for yourself, MCSE.
The command line is the most natural interface possible if you are computer literate. Think of it as comparing books to TV. If you are a literate person you might still watch TV to veg out and because it is a totally different medium it can do some things better. But even though seeing the Battle of Helm's Deep was hella cool, the books tell a much more detailed and better story.
Yes, graphical tools are handy for new users and even us old timers can use them for really simple tasks, but dependence on them should be avoided by those seeking mastery. UNIX is a language and you won't ever understand it until you reach a conversational level at the command prompt.
> Do they really believe that *NIX users like their OS because of the > command line?
Yes, and you will pry it from my cold dead fingers. Command prompts, everything is a file, pipes, redirection. These things are what make *NIX what it is, any attempt to change that will be met with fierce resistence. See resource forks for an example of an idea the graphical dweebs try unsuccessfully to foist off on us every year or so for an example.
> Oh, and FYI, professors are leftist because they actually study the > world... but are perfectly willing to listen to economic theory > espoused by people unqualified to do so.
Yea right. Most professors are leftist because they fall into an easy fallacy. That expertise in one area is transferrable. Being a first rate physicist does not mean you know jack about philosophy, politics or economics. But you would be hard pressed to find one who understood that.
And the reason most fall for socialism is easy enough to understand if one understands human nature. Socialism tells the chrome domes that they are the enlightened few, and that they should be running the world. Who wouldn't like that sort of ego stroking? Especially since few have had much exposure to philosophy or political science, and of the few who have it is mostly of the marxist rewritten variety popular on college campuses.
But they shouldn't be running the world, centralized planning dooesn't work, millions of mass graves and starving masses in lands that used to export food are proof for any with eyes to see. For you see, even if the experts ARE truly expert in their field, can avoid becoming corrupt, etc. No expert is as smart as the free market. Millions of average intellects interracting in the free market exhibits greater wisdom than any single, or small cabal of, geniuses,
As for ecomists, they fall into two catagories: Marxist crackpots who should be dismissed from their tenured perches and the real ones who deal with reality. Most of the non-marxists understand that a true monopoly is very hard to sustain without government intervention in the marketplace. Of course Microsoft does benefit from such intervention so it is a legitimate thing if the government should decide to try fixing their mess.
> Sorry, but if I buy a computer that comes with a pirated copy of the OS > (from a white box OEM) I will go after them tooth and nail should I find > out.
Amen to that. Basically they ripped you off, no different than if you paid for 2G of memory and found they had shorted you a stick. Unless you knew they were bootlegging the OS, then you are both wrong.
> I write software for a living. So long as I expect to get paid for my > work it would be very hypocritical of me to support the illegal > software trade.
I only write software as needed to support my admin work, but as a Free Software advocate (and occasional devel) it would be hypocritical to support piracy as well. Only by making Windows victims see the full price of Windows can we hope to convert them.
Of course the sticker price of Windows is trivial compared to the whole horrible cost of using it. I'm at a public library; that means we could pretty much get the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to comp us all the stuff we could find hardware to host it on. The only Windows software we use these days is a couple in VMWare virtual machines and IE in Crossover Office. Free (as in beer) software is only free if your time is free. But I ain't a kid playing around in his bedroom so I go with stuff that works. Linux works. BSD is also a good choice on servers. But Windows just isn't an answer to any question I am asking.
> however people DO have a choice right now between Linux and Windows, > and they're still choosing Windows.
Only on the server do people have a choice. And considering how many billions of dollars HP, Dell, IBM, etc are claiming in Linux server sales I'd say people ARE voting with their feet.
On the desktop it is a different story. Don;t even try using Lindows as a n example for why Linux on the desktop isn't working. They are the example of what is wrong, they are only offered on third tier hardware that most enterprise shops wouldn't touch wuth a cattle prod. When a top ten OEM offers a desktop Linux at or under the price of the same machine loaded with XP, then you can talk. But the current situation is far from what I'd call competition.
Now we have the situation where every desktop purchase comes with XP. And still thousands of people are discarding (or dual booting) Windows and loading up Linux. You have to want Linux badly enough to buy Windows preloaded and be willing to ERASE in favor of Linux. And note that most OEM boxes these days don't provide recovery media so once you blow Windows off there isn't an easy way back, that is just a hundred+ dollars down the toilet.
> Software should be making lives easier and simpler.
Oversimplification. And yes, designing a general purpose computer and it's OS around the idea that the user will require a bit of training makes for a more usable computer. If you want consumer electronics, buy consumer electronics. Tivo is a good example of Linux made user friendly for the consumer electronics masses. GNOME, KDE and emacs aren't, but are more useful for those willing to invest the effort.
> If our developers and/or users really think with their heads this far > up their asses, the platform is dead.
Calculus is very useful, but will never be made 'user friendly'. Does this make it 'dead' also? No, the answer is to follow the Unix way and make the hard things possible even if it makes the really easy things a little harder.
> At least this is my experience at a University, where in theory > everyone WANTS to be there.
No, everyone there would like a degree. Totally different from a desire to learn.
> Other wise people would agree (I suspect some of them founded the US...)
Yes, they founded a country by writing a Constituition that very clearly spelled out what the national government could do, then passed Amendment X which made explicit that anything not specifically delegated to the national government was forbidden to it. Find me the section authorizing a Department of Education. If you can't then please admit they are violating the law by having one.
Also note that the US did not have government operated schools or madatory school during the lifetime of the Founding fathers.
I think both of these observations taken together speak volumes as to which side the Founding Fathers would be on were their graves to suddenly spring open.
> The ability to accept and allow others to make decisions we don't > approve of is an admirable goal, and the main tenet of libertarianism. > However, in the context of education, it's tantamount to the self-esteem >nonsense that says that little Johnny's horrendous grammar is as good as > correct English usage, simply because his parents, them uses the same > grammar.
Not exactly. Unless you believe yourself, or identify someone else as being so superior than the rest of us common folk, you can't answer the big question that arises from your position. Who decides?
Just who decides what little Johnny MUST learn and what he MUST NOT be taught? You, me and probably Rev Falwell agree that teaching that the Earth is flat would be daft. Thee and me would teach evolution but I doubt Rev Falwell would if he were in a position of power to make the decision for your child. See the problem? 2+2=4 is always right, but a lot of what gets passed out in school as 'unalterable fact' is anything but. So again, who are you nominating as supreme wise man to rule over us all? I don't have a candidate, and wouldn't accept one. Anyone.
> There is a point where parents can be poor parents yet still not be > abusive or neglecting. After all, if little Johnny wants to be a > quantum physicist (assuming he's smart enough to be one), and his > parents are rural farmers, how do they afford to send him to a > private school where he can learn
1. The world isn't fair. Get over it. All previous attempts to make everyone equal has boiled down to smashing everyone down to the level of the lowest. Not good. But, especially during a transition to private education, I wouldn't have a problem with some sort of system of subsidies for the very poor.
2. Worst case, we have Libraries and the Internet. Lincoln did pretty good from reading by his fireplace. And real talent should always be able to attract a scholorship or something.
> And if you suggest a regulatory board over private schools, that > takes away the fundamental advantage of them not being public schools.
Not if it is a private organization. Like modern colleges and universities. Like Underwriters Labratories. Or Consumer Reports, etc.
All solutions do not have to come from the government.
> I can't figure out what to do with the 50% or so of students who would > just stop their education,
You solved this yourself.
> But you have to admit, the current system isn't working for them anyway, > teachers are basically disciniplinary robots who talk a lot on the side.
Exactly. So write them the hell off for now if we have to, but we can and should save the other half. That bad half wouldn't have graduated literate anyway so they would only be out a useless diploma. But the other half can and should be saved from ignorance and illiteracy.
Ideas for saving the defective half isn't a problem with the education system though, so is really out of scope for this thread. But starting with the whole welfare state and the destruction of the family unit would be a a good starting point.
> What would more quickly deny the Rule of Law is if everybody started > sending their kids to
Ok, I'm going to make this simple. Two visions to pick from.
1. We the People, while having a few crackpots, are generally an enlightened people capable of self government. In this vision we let a few cranks do stupid things, thereby preserving OUR right to someday be the crank doing something most 'right thinking people' think is a little daft. It is called Freedom, it's a Good Thing(tm).
2. We are the small, mean, hate filled things the Democratic Party teaches that we are, that but for the Grace of their enlightened leadership we would have fallen into abject depravity and perhaps even cannibalism itself in the more rural of the red states. In which case it's fucking pointless. If we really are that sort of a People then we aren't fit for self government and need to just abandon this Republic/Democracy bull and let Kerry or Justice O'Conner put on the damned crown they so long to wear.
> There has to be a minimal standard of critical thinking and > reasoning taught to all members of any nation
But where is it written on stone tablets that the government has any business setting these minimal standards? Especially the Federal one? Unwritten custom could probably be enough. After all, if a majority of We The People ever started believing that reason and critical thinking weren't important, do you really think some pinhead writing a regulation in Washington would help?
But of course that isn't what they love to do, they love to micromanage, decide whether we spend a week of class time to math or writing essays about Earth Day and poems to Gaia.
> I don't think he ruled out the elimination of Public Schools as > incapable of solving the problem, I think he ruled it out as being > incapable of being accomplished.
Unless one is willing to attack the root of a problem, expecting to solve it is pointless mental masturbation. Almost all of the problems with education today derive from being controlled by government.
You can't fire incompetents because of government granted monopolies to the teachers unions. Who the hell thought tenure for a grade school teacher was a good idea? Tenure protects the publishing academic from being fired for an unpopular paper. How many K-12 teachers publish? Plus it SHOULD be acceptable to fire one for unacceptable behaviour in class. K-12 isn't college, what is ecentric there shouldn't be tolerated from those entrusted with more impresionable children.
You can't fix the defective cirriculum because all decisions regarding it must go through half a dozen layers of educrats, all with conflicts of interest out the wazoo, most more concerned with political correctness than with education.
You can't fix the problem of defective kids screwing up the class for the few who actually DO want to learn because the schools are full of government educrats and there really isn't anyplace else to put em. Because they don't WANT there to be, headcount being so godawfully important.
Care to name a major problem with government education that COULD be fixed? No, the answer is don't mend it, end it.
> I will agree that the introduction of competition between educational > systems is an absolute requirement to the improvement of schools in > general,
Government schools 'competing' with other government schools in a contest created and judged by government educrats. Oh yea, that will fix it. I voted for Shrubbie, but it certainly wasn't for that damned fool "No Child Left Behind" thingy. Any positive bits were promptly scrubbed out along it's journey through Congress and The Honorable Senator Edward M. Kennedy office.
> There are more ways to go about this than to just burn down the > establishment and start over.
Not really. And even if some mighty legislative hero did sweep away the obstacles and make the government schools start working, one perhaps two generations and we would be right back here again. It just can't work. The incentives are just all wrong. Parents are disenfranchised while the teachers unions are going to have the ear of the legislature. Passing uneducated students will always be less headache than failing em. And so long as the schools get their revenue from any source OTHER than parents, their ultimate focus is going to be on pleasing that other source.
> Finally, I've read the Bill of Rights and the Constitution myself, and > no where does it state that the government may not establish a public > education system.
If it doesn't say it can, then it can't. That is what a government of laws is all about. And just to make sure that product of government education could figure it out they went back and tacked on this:
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Guess they didn't count on what a modern miseducation could do to a persons ability to reason though since it didn't help in your case. (Ok, cheap shot. But Goddammit people, this ain't rocket science, it is plainly written English. You read Slashdot, can probably even program a frickin VCR from the bad engrish manual even.)
For those riding the short bus, Amendment X (the NO amendment if you need a memory aid) says that if a power isn't specifically listed in the Constituition then Congress has no authority to do it. Since my copy doesn't contain an Amendment adding oversight of children's education to Congress's enumerated powers....
Yes, the whole US Department of Education is unconstituitional. As are most of the Cabinet level posts and their whole entrenched nests of vermin.
> Granted, I'm not a Supreme Court justice, the only people who can > make an official, legal interpretation of the Constitution, but if > you're posting here on Slashdot, than I doubt you are one either.
Wrong again. We the People delegate certain powers to the various levels of government but it derives from US. If we buy into this notion that only the Holy Ones can read the Constituition and understand it then we are fscked. So don't. When they flagrently rewrite whole sections, yell, bitch and carry on so that they at least know we are fully aware we are getting the shaft. Perhaps if we make enough ruckus they might start fearing we might get pissed enough to take em out. Which is ALSO one of our inalieable Rights. The 2nd Amendment is not about preserving the right to hunt.
Lets be blunt here. How many of the so called Bill of Rights have the courts NOT allowed to be trampled under their jackbooted feet, just in the last few years?
I McCain Fiengold. Need I say more? If banning overt political speech isn't protected by the 1st then what the hell were the Founders on about anyway when they wrote this one?
II Nuff said. At least we are making progress on getting this one back. I am the NRA. Are you? Well why not?
III Ok, this one is holding up pretty well
IV Pitched battles rage over this one, whether it still stands depends on whether you think some of the more odious parts of PATRIOT withstand constituitional muster. But at least debatable by honest folk.
V They just kicked that one square in the nuts.
VI Don't make me laugh. Unless you can speak of ten year trials & appeals as 'speedy' or hand picked juries in venue shopped courts as "impartial jury". Or for that matter juries have been pretty much written out of the law with judges feeling free to set aside verdicts they don't like.
VII You can at least make an argument for this one standing.
> First, could you please explain how public schools aren't compatibile > with a republican form of government?
I already replied once, forgot to answer this part after getting sidetracked on the big vs small R part.
Simply that our government, especially considering the Bill of Rights, is based on the idea that folks should be free from government control to the greatest extent possible, no government mandated religion, no official government press, etc. How can you reconcile this principle with forcing every parent to subject their children to years of government mandated propaganda? Forget establishing a State religion! Hell, church only gets the little buggers a couple of hours on Sunday if they want to go. The schools get em five days a week and can send the cops over to pick em up if they don't wanna go.
The power to mandate what will and will not be taught to the next generation is far too much power to entrust to an instituition as corruptable as any Government. There are ample signs this power has already been much abused, who here believes any check could ever be placed on a government that won't obey it's own written Constituition?
No, the answer is to cut every responsibility that can be cut, leaving the remainder at the lowest level of the government possible. Education is a function that can be placed outside the government so it should be.
> And most ran on forced labor with illerate slaves doing all the work... > And come to think of it, so did the United States, up until 1865... > Hmmm. Not hard to have an advanced society when you can kidnap people > and legally force them to do what you want....
So now we kidnap people, spend thirteen years crushing every spark of independent thought, ram in just enough technical skill to make em a good factory worker and... oops, we done gone and outsourced all of the factory drone jobs. So we stick em on welfare or some dead end job and make sure they are zoned out on mind numbing TV shows or intoxicating chemicals so they never realize they aren't Free anymore. Meanwhile the upper classes send their children to private schools so they will have a chance of becoming thinking citizens.
Somehow I fail to see where this is an improvement. At least with slavery it was all out in the open what was going on.
> First, could you please explain how public schools aren't compatibile > with a republican (small 'r' -- let's not get all political part here) > form of government?
Republican as in the Constituition's mandate that each state shall have "a Republican form of Government." As opposed to a Democracy for example, which the Founding Fathers rightly considered a perversion since it denies the Rule of Law. Or a kingdom or other un-free form of government. But this is going off topic.
> See my other post in this thread for my detailed reasons why a purely > private system is flawed.
Ok, just did. Yes some private schools will be substandard but some will excel. If one believes in the Free Market and that parents will, in general, give a damn about their children then they will select for the better schools over time. Government schools will tend to all be teh same, poor. Government does nothing well except be a constant threat to liberty. The Founders believed government to be an evil, even if a necessary one. I agree.
> However, when dealing with the beaurocracy of any school system, > public or private, parents who either don't care about their child's > performance, parents who complain when you rightfully say that their > child is performing badly, etc., the life of a modern school teacher > isn't an easy one.
Which is making my point in a way. Today even the private schools are mostly just a mirror of the public system since they are heavily regulated. But those problems didn't always exist and it should not be taken as a core assumption that they must exist in a functioning system of education. Only by unleashing the full power of competition can the problem be solved.
> hmmm... can you point to some countries where it has been tried?
The United States prior to the introduction of mandatory state run education.
> was it successful?
Yes.
> what is the literacy rate in those countries?
Much higher than it is now. And people could actually think back then, a nice bonus.
Consider this. Go locate a copy of the Federalist Papers. Read a couple and then come back and reread what I am about to say:
All of those papers ran in mass circulation newspapers of the day, the average person was both literate enough but also knowledgable enough on the issues of the day to read them, understand the arguments and could and did discuss them with their friends, neighbors and co-workers.
Think about the implications of that statement. Assuming a newspaper actually ran a series of articles of such weighty content, could more than 10% of their readers (already diminished by TV) understand them, let alone find others able to intelligently discuss them? This is the bitter harvest of several generations of public education.
Yes, a lot of people stopped school after the sixth or eighth grade and went to work, but never make the mistake of confusing what passed for an eighth grade education back then with how little actually useful knowledge one needs to learn today to get a college degree.
> Much as I despise the way public education is run in my country right > now I'm loathe to give too much power to the parents...
Some must be sacrificed is all are to be saved. You can't have it both ways. Authority MUST follow responsibility. If parents are going to be responsible for their children they must have the authority to actually carry out the responsibility. Or you believe children are the property of the State and we should just do like Cuba and yank all the kids into barracks as soon as they can walk and be done with it.
I agree that there are people with children who shouldn't be honored with the word 'parent' but short of removing them from the corrosive environment there probably isn't much to be done. If the parents are defective products of the modern welfare state & education system it is going to be very hard to get useful citizens. Must admit I don't have a good answer to the problem. Wish I did. But the answer isn't to make EVERYONE a ward of the state and breed yet another generation of helpless dependents.
> One of the largest problems with education (at least American > education) is the utter lack of critical thinking skills. American > education is based in doctrines developed by Horace Mann at the > beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Exactly. But public education will never address the problem, it IS the problem. It was created for the express purpose of turning out obedient little cogs to fit into the Industrial machine. They don't teach critical thinking because they understand as well as you probably do that a People who can think will be a Free People and this is the last thing they want. People who can think watch CNN and either giggle uncontrollable or just shake their heads sadly. (Not picking on just CNN, FoxNews, NYT, NPR, etc would equally fit.)
The powers that run the country like things as they are and are frankly afraid whether the country could survive if we were to have a hundred million or so actual Citizens. Personally I figure it would be absolute chaos for a few decades and then we would figure it out so say "Bring it on!"
First you need to be open minded enough to stop excluding the best solution out of hand. If you have a sucking chest wound you don't say "What is the best thing I can do, except stop the bleeding?"
Public schools don't work, can't work and aren't even compatible with a Republican form of Government.
Step one: board up every public school and college of education.
Seriously. The damage is beyond repairing, it is systemic and inherent in the concept of forced government education as we currently understand it. Therefore any attempts at 'reform' only prolong a real solution and are a bad idea.
Private schools all the way. Even if someone wants to send their kids to an Islamic fundamentalist madrassas. The Right to be Wrong is the #1 basic right because the second thee or me presumes to sit in judgement of a parent's choice we presume to 1) be their master and 2) be wise enough to make their decisions for them. If parents are going to be empowered to truly make educational decisions for their children we must accept decisions we don't approve of.
The only place for the State to intervene is in cases which could rightly be called abuse/neglect.
Once that policy decision is made, everything else follows. The idea that a math major isn't qualified to teach mathamatics is one that only a union operation with a government mandated monopoly could think up so there go the 'colleges of education' to be replaced with majors in their subject matter perhaps supplementing with a couple of courses in pedagogy.
Here is the secret. Teaching isn't particularly hard. All it requires is a knowledgable and reasonably patient master and an apprentice motivated to learn. Note the ancient usages there, that was intentional and intended to remind just how far back learning goes. They didn't need billions of words of academic text telling them how to do it, they just did it.
Intel spent over a decade spending billions to convince everyone that it it didn't have "Intel Inside" it was crap. Ok, they won that battle and it is now costing them the war.
What they didn't consider is just HOW the average person would perceive "Intel Inside", i.e. as an Intel processor running the Intel ISA. So when Intel itself tried to shift gears and say "no, we meant buy anything we throw out the front door" customers balked. The sad fact is that AMD understood the implications of what Intel's marketing dept had done to the marketplace better than Intel, hence AMD64.
Plus there is the practical problem. Unless you are doing scientific computing you don't see a benefit from Itanic because there are few applications running native and emulated performance sucks. The scientific computing set tends to be writing and compiling their own code so they are in a position to benefit, hence their interest in buying clusters of Itaniums. The DEC Alpha died a similar niche market death and unless Intel manages a major marketing miracle Itanium is fated for the same sad end.
Or has everyone forgotten Alpha? A totally kick ass CPU design killed by lack of natice apps? When Microsoft tried to push off the ia32 version of Office via emulation that pretty much killed it as everyone else decided emulation was good enough for a market that hadn't proved itself yet. So Alpha died in the mass market from underperformance and languished in large racks doing scientific computing until it could no longer sell enough volume to justify the R&D to continue ramping performance. Also pretty much the same story as Sparc.
> If your intent is to share, why purposely step on the toes of someone > who may want to take you up on the offer?
If you want the poster child for the importance of the GPL, I nominate Cisco Systems/Linksys. Every time ESR says teh GPL isn't important somebody in the audience needs to hold up a WRT54G and wave it around. Linksys only released the source because of the GPL, and to be honest, the first release was half hearted. But now a whole community exists around modifying the firmware, which just has to be driving sales in a visible way. So now we get a tarball with EVERYTHING, including the mips toolchain, ready to go. The only part still missing is the network drivers and those belong to Broadcom.
> Sun spent millions of dollars of its own cold, hard, cash to buy > StarDivision... >...There is simply no greater example of corporate commitment to the > ideals > of open source.
No, Sun was pissed at Microsoft at the time and saw OO.o as the only way to hurt them. The Office monopoly is now what drives the Windows monopoly, not the other way around. Or at least that was Sun's thinking, and they are probably pretty close to the mark. Doesn't make em our friend though.
If you want proof, look at how they are always trying to tie OO.o to Java, forcing others, like RedHat who IS our friend, to spend tons of cash in an attempt to keep gcj close enough to be able to build it. In the end, OO.o is not the answer. Nobody really likes it, it is as big and bloated as MS Office and not a whole hell of a lot more stable. And sooner or later, and you can bookmark this post if you want, Sun will betray us over OO.o. There will be an attempt to fork and things will get a hell of a lot uglier than the XFree86 - X.org changeover. Patents will be wielded.
> Sun is without a doubt the biggest giver in open source history,
True. But that was long ago, in a different age. Sun changed, fear lead to hate and agression; the Dark Side.
> Open source does NOT mean GPL, or even GPL compatible.
No, but is does mean DSFG compatible and Sun hasn't figured that out and probably never will until it is far too late for them. And Solaris's license, while it squeeked by the DSFG test was specifically intended to exclude code exchange with any other existing project. So while they will lose little by it, they also won't gain much. So what was the point? Letting their diminishing userbase track bugs down is a win, but the code as currently shipped isn't complete enough to stand on it's own very well and can't be filled in by importing existing Free code. Plus what they posted as Open Solaris isn't exactly what they ship as Solaris so it isn't even all that useful as documentation for their users.
This is Darwin all over again, where a few diehard code jockeys will poke around because porting NetBSD to yet another game console isn't challenging anymore, but it won't be able to grow a viable user community.
Slashdot Mirror
> Coke, tobacco companies, pepsi, johnson and johnson... Stop spreading
> neo-con bullshit.
Ok, I'll give you Coke (incorporated around 1893), they certainly don't look like they are going anywhere soon and have tentacles everywhere. But Pepsico isn't that old (incorporated 1903: i.e. 20th Century) and big tobacco will be dead and buried in another decade or so. J&J was founded in 1887 so ok, it qualifies as late 19th century and is still fairly strong. No rule is absolute, I'm looking at the general trends and there just aren't very many 100+ year old corporations and even fewer that hit 150. At some point stupidity sets in, they stumble and get picked off. Corporations are mortal it seems.
But I figured somebody would bring up Proctor & Gamble founded fifty years earlier in 1837. They seem to have dug themselves into a nice boring market niche and damned if can see how anybody is going to blast em out it.
> where they inevitably fail, costing the economy millions.
Condemn her if you want, I rejoice in her stupidity as confirmation of evolution in action. For all those who fear the huge soulless corporations, let her be an object lesson. If we can get the government out of the business of propping them up, most of those corporations can't survive the loss of their founder by more than 10-20 years. Small nimble companies are much better adapted to serving the customer.
Think about it. how many 19th century corporations still exist here at the open of the 21st? Not many and none anywhere the prime of their strength. Some of the once great rail corporations lumber along. Sears barely limped into the 21st as an example of walking dead, only to be bought out by the bond ghouls who leveraged ownership of K-Mart out of bankruptcy court. Doesn't matter, the world has moved on and it is Walmart's day now. But Sam Walton is dead and their day will soon pass.
HP didn't long survive Hewlet & Packard's exit. And neither will Microsoft survive Gates and Balmer's retirement as anything like what they are now. Too big to outright fail, too impotent to matter anymore. Sometimes a large zombie corporation falls under control of a new leader and revives for a time, see IBM. But again, the leader moves on and the decline begins anew.
> Why is Salt Lake City funding the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents?
> They're in england!
Well a sig does have a fairly short limit, and I'm old school and wouldn't ever go over 72 chars anyway.
SLC is the Schools and Librarys Corp, a psuedo government corporation that suckles at the the teat created by the line item on your phone bill called "Universal Service Fund". It dispenses money to schools and libraries to subsidize their Internet connection.... with more strings than Pinocchio. One of the nastier ones being CIPA.
CIPA is the Child Internet Protection Act. It, like most big government programs tend to, 'protects' the children by the simple expedient of infantalizing everyone. Filtering children's Internet access is a no brainer, something we were doing years before the feds rediscovered the Internet. But we did it in a sensible way, considering the limitations of the tech. We had a filter. Then we didn't allow minors to access the Internet at ALL without a parental consent form, because the net is a dangerous place even with a filter. The parent could set their preferred level of access for each child, well by library card actually. They could pick from:
1. No access at all
2. Access only when accompanied by them.
3. Filtered
4. Unfiltered.
Here in rural Louisiana, buckle of the bible belt, a fair number of parents picked unfiltered for older teens. Then Great White Father in Washington overrulled them, declaring nobody would receive unfiltered access by default and only those over 18 could even put in a per session request for unfiltered. Period, end of discussion.
In the areas where cable is available, DSL also tends to be available. And competitive. BellSouth is the government sponsored DSL monopoly competitor to Cox, the government sponsored Cable monopoly here. Cox currently offers a slightly faster connection in theory but no static IP. And of course I actually talked to a Cox rep. Sure they offer a 6mb down (unknown up) plan, but they only have 24mb serving the whole fscking city. Sign my ass up now! Of course I'd be the only iso scarfing file leech in town. I only have 3mb with BellSouth, but I actually get 3mb downloads on a routine basis. And for me, static IP is not something I'd be willing to trade off. I connect back to home from work as often as I connect to work from home. Sure you can kludge things to work with random IP, but it is so much better to just assign a name in a bind config file and forget it.
> No one really likes the command line... plenty of people get by with
> it, but it's obviously the most primitive computer interface.
Speak for yourself, MCSE.
The command line is the most natural interface possible if you are computer literate. Think of it as comparing books to TV. If you are a literate person you might still watch TV to veg out and because it is a totally different medium it can do some things better. But even though seeing the Battle of Helm's Deep was hella cool, the books tell a much more detailed and better story.
Yes, graphical tools are handy for new users and even us old timers can use them for really simple tasks, but dependence on them should be avoided by those seeking mastery. UNIX is a language and you won't ever understand it until you reach a conversational level at the command prompt.
> Do they really believe that *NIX users like their OS because of the
> command line?
Yes, and you will pry it from my cold dead fingers. Command prompts, everything is a file, pipes, redirection. These things are what make *NIX what it is, any attempt to change that will be met with fierce resistence. See resource forks for an example of an idea the graphical dweebs try unsuccessfully to foist off on us every year or so for an example.
> Oh, and FYI, professors are leftist because they actually study the
> world... but are perfectly willing to listen to economic theory
> espoused by people unqualified to do so.
Yea right. Most professors are leftist because they fall into an easy fallacy. That expertise in one area is transferrable. Being a first rate physicist does not mean you know jack about philosophy, politics or economics. But you would be hard pressed to find one who understood that.
And the reason most fall for socialism is easy enough to understand if one understands human nature. Socialism tells the chrome domes that they are the enlightened few, and that they should be running the world. Who wouldn't like that sort of ego stroking? Especially since few have had much exposure to philosophy or political science, and of the few who have it is mostly of the marxist rewritten variety popular on college campuses.
But they shouldn't be running the world, centralized planning dooesn't work, millions of mass graves and starving masses in lands that used to export food are proof for any with eyes to see. For you see, even if the experts ARE truly expert in their field, can avoid becoming corrupt, etc. No expert is as smart as the free market. Millions of average intellects interracting in the free market exhibits greater wisdom than any single, or small cabal of, geniuses,
As for ecomists, they fall into two catagories: Marxist crackpots who should be dismissed from their tenured perches and the real ones who deal with reality. Most of the non-marxists understand that a true monopoly is very hard to sustain without government intervention in the marketplace. Of course Microsoft does benefit from such intervention so it is a legitimate thing if the government should decide to try fixing their mess.
> Sorry, but if I buy a computer that comes with a pirated copy of the OS
> (from a white box OEM) I will go after them tooth and nail should I find
> out.
Amen to that. Basically they ripped you off, no different than if you paid for 2G of memory and found they had shorted you a stick. Unless you knew they were bootlegging the OS, then you are both wrong.
> I write software for a living. So long as I expect to get paid for my
> work it would be very hypocritical of me to support the illegal
> software trade.
I only write software as needed to support my admin work, but as a Free Software advocate (and occasional devel) it would be hypocritical to support piracy as well. Only by making Windows victims see the full price of Windows can we hope to convert them.
Of course the sticker price of Windows is trivial compared to the whole horrible cost of using it. I'm at a public library; that means we could pretty much get the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to comp us all the stuff we could find hardware to host it on. The only Windows software we use these days is a couple in VMWare virtual machines and IE in Crossover Office. Free (as in beer) software is only free if your time is free. But I ain't a kid playing around in his bedroom so I go with stuff that works. Linux works. BSD is also a good choice on servers. But Windows just isn't an answer to any question I am asking.
> however people DO have a choice right now between Linux and Windows,
> and they're still choosing Windows.
Only on the server do people have a choice. And considering how many billions of dollars HP, Dell, IBM, etc are claiming in Linux server sales I'd say people ARE voting with their feet.
On the desktop it is a different story. Don;t even try using Lindows as a n example for why Linux on the desktop isn't working. They are the example of what is wrong, they are only offered on third tier hardware that most enterprise shops wouldn't touch wuth a cattle prod. When a top ten OEM offers a desktop Linux at or under the price of the same machine loaded with XP, then you can talk. But the current situation is far from what I'd call competition.
Now we have the situation where every desktop purchase comes with XP. And still thousands of people are discarding (or dual booting) Windows and loading up Linux. You have to want Linux badly enough to buy Windows preloaded and be willing to ERASE in favor of Linux. And note that most OEM boxes these days don't provide recovery media so once you blow Windows off there isn't an easy way back, that is just a hundred+ dollars down the toilet.
> Software should be making lives easier and simpler.
Oversimplification. And yes, designing a general purpose computer and it's OS around the idea that the user will require a bit of training makes for a more usable computer. If you want consumer electronics, buy consumer electronics. Tivo is a good example of Linux made user friendly for the consumer electronics masses. GNOME, KDE and emacs aren't, but are more useful for those willing to invest the effort.
> If our developers and/or users really think with their heads this far
> up their asses, the platform is dead.
Calculus is very useful, but will never be made 'user friendly'. Does this make it 'dead' also? No, the answer is to follow the Unix way and make the hard things possible even if it makes the really easy things a little harder.
> At least this is my experience at a University, where in theory
> everyone WANTS to be there.
No, everyone there would like a degree. Totally different from a desire to learn.
> Other wise people would agree (I suspect some of them founded the US...)
Yes, they founded a country by writing a Constituition that very clearly spelled out what the national government could do, then passed Amendment X which made explicit that anything not specifically delegated to the national government was forbidden to it. Find me the section authorizing a Department of Education. If you can't then please admit they are violating the law by having one.
Also note that the US did not have government operated schools or madatory school during the lifetime of the Founding fathers.
I think both of these observations taken together speak volumes as to which side the Founding Fathers would be on were their graves to suddenly spring open.
> The ability to accept and allow others to make decisions we don't
> approve of is an admirable goal, and the main tenet of libertarianism.
> However, in the context of education, it's tantamount to the self-esteem
>nonsense that says that little Johnny's horrendous grammar is as good as
> correct English usage, simply because his parents, them uses the same
> grammar.
Not exactly. Unless you believe yourself, or identify someone else as being so superior than the rest of us common folk, you can't answer the big question that arises from your position. Who decides?
Just who decides what little Johnny MUST learn and what he MUST NOT be taught? You, me and probably Rev Falwell agree that teaching that the Earth is flat would be daft. Thee and me would teach evolution but I doubt Rev Falwell would if he were in a position of power to make the decision for your child. See the problem? 2+2=4 is always right, but a lot of what gets passed out in school as 'unalterable fact' is anything but. So again, who are you nominating as supreme wise man to rule over us all? I don't have a candidate, and wouldn't accept one. Anyone.
> There is a point where parents can be poor parents yet still not be
> abusive or neglecting. After all, if little Johnny wants to be a
> quantum physicist (assuming he's smart enough to be one), and his
> parents are rural farmers, how do they afford to send him to a
> private school where he can learn
1. The world isn't fair. Get over it. All previous attempts to make everyone equal has boiled down to smashing everyone down to the level of the lowest. Not good. But, especially during a transition to private education, I wouldn't have a problem with some sort of system of subsidies for the very poor.
2. Worst case, we have Libraries and the Internet. Lincoln did pretty good from reading by his fireplace. And real talent should always be able to attract a scholorship or something.
> And if you suggest a regulatory board over private schools, that
> takes away the fundamental advantage of them not being public schools.
Not if it is a private organization. Like modern colleges and universities. Like Underwriters Labratories. Or Consumer Reports, etc.
All solutions do not have to come from the government.
> I can't figure out what to do with the 50% or so of students who would
> just stop their education,
You solved this yourself.
> But you have to admit, the current system isn't working for them anyway,
> teachers are basically disciniplinary robots who talk a lot on the side.
Exactly. So write them the hell off for now if we have to, but we can and should save the other half. That bad half wouldn't have graduated literate anyway so they would only be out a useless diploma. But the other half can and should be saved from ignorance and illiteracy.
Ideas for saving the defective half isn't a problem with the education system though, so is really out of scope for this thread. But starting with the whole welfare state and the destruction of the family unit would be a a good starting point.
> What would more quickly deny the Rule of Law is if everybody started
> sending their kids to
Ok, I'm going to make this simple. Two visions to pick from.
1. We the People, while having a few crackpots, are generally an enlightened people capable of self government. In this vision we let a few cranks do stupid things, thereby preserving OUR right to someday be the crank doing something most 'right thinking people' think is a little daft. It is called Freedom, it's a Good Thing(tm).
2. We are the small, mean, hate filled things the Democratic Party teaches that we are, that but for the Grace of their enlightened leadership we would have fallen into abject depravity and perhaps even cannibalism itself in the more rural of the red states. In which case it's fucking pointless. If we really are that sort of a People then we aren't fit for self government and need to just abandon this Republic/Democracy bull and let Kerry or Justice O'Conner put on the damned crown they so long to wear.
> There has to be a minimal standard of critical thinking and
> reasoning taught to all members of any nation
But where is it written on stone tablets that the government has any business setting these minimal standards? Especially the Federal one? Unwritten custom could probably be enough. After all, if a majority of We The People ever started believing that reason and critical thinking weren't important, do you really think some pinhead writing a regulation in Washington would help?
But of course that isn't what they love to do, they love to micromanage, decide whether we spend a week of class time to math or writing essays about Earth Day and poems to Gaia.
> I don't think he ruled out the elimination of Public Schools as
> incapable of solving the problem, I think he ruled it out as being
> incapable of being accomplished.
Unless one is willing to attack the root of a problem, expecting to solve it is pointless mental masturbation. Almost all of the problems with education today derive from being controlled by government.
You can't fire incompetents because of government granted monopolies to the teachers unions. Who the hell thought tenure for a grade school teacher was a good idea? Tenure protects the publishing academic from being fired for an unpopular paper. How many K-12 teachers publish? Plus it SHOULD be acceptable to fire one for unacceptable behaviour in class. K-12 isn't college, what is ecentric there shouldn't be tolerated from those entrusted with more impresionable children.
You can't fix the defective cirriculum because all decisions regarding it must go through half a dozen layers of educrats, all with conflicts of interest out the wazoo, most more concerned with political correctness than with education.
You can't fix the problem of defective kids screwing up the class for the few who actually DO want to learn because the schools are full of government educrats and there really isn't anyplace else to put em. Because they don't WANT there to be, headcount being so godawfully important.
Care to name a major problem with government education that COULD be fixed? No, the answer is don't mend it, end it.
> I will agree that the introduction of competition between educational
> systems is an absolute requirement to the improvement of schools in
> general,
Government schools 'competing' with other government schools in a contest created and judged by government educrats. Oh yea, that will fix it. I voted for Shrubbie, but it certainly wasn't for that damned fool "No Child Left Behind" thingy. Any positive bits were promptly scrubbed out along it's journey through Congress and The Honorable Senator Edward M. Kennedy office.
> There are more ways to go about this than to just burn down the
> establishment and start over.
Not really. And even if some mighty legislative hero did sweep away the obstacles and make the government schools start working, one perhaps two generations and we would be right back here again. It just can't work. The incentives are just all wrong. Parents are disenfranchised while the teachers unions are going to have the ear of the legislature. Passing uneducated students will always be less headache than failing em. And so long as the schools get their revenue from any source OTHER than parents, their ultimate focus is going to be on pleasing that other source.
> Finally, I've read the Bill of Rights and the Constitution myself, and
> no where does it state that the government may not establish a public
> education system.
If it doesn't say it can, then it can't. That is what a government of laws is all about. And just to make sure that product of government education could figure it out they went back and tacked on this:
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Guess they didn't count on what a modern miseducation could do to a persons ability to reason though since it didn't help in your case. (Ok, cheap shot. But Goddammit people, this ain't rocket science, it is plainly written English. You read Slashdot, can probably even program a frickin VCR from the bad engrish manual even.)
For those riding the short bus, Amendment X (the NO amendment if you need a memory aid) says that if a power isn't specifically listed in the Constituition then Congress has no authority to do it. Since my copy doesn't contain an Amendment adding oversight of children's education to Congress's enumerated powers....
Yes, the whole US Department of Education is unconstituitional. As are most of the Cabinet level posts and their whole entrenched nests of vermin.
> Granted, I'm not a Supreme Court justice, the only people who can
> make an official, legal interpretation of the Constitution, but if
> you're posting here on Slashdot, than I doubt you are one either.
Wrong again. We the People delegate certain powers to the various levels of government but it derives from US. If we buy into this notion that only the Holy Ones can read the Constituition and understand it then we are fscked. So don't. When they flagrently rewrite whole sections, yell, bitch and carry on so that they at least know we are fully aware we are getting the shaft. Perhaps if we make enough ruckus they might start fearing we might get pissed enough to take em out. Which is ALSO one of our inalieable Rights. The 2nd Amendment is not about preserving the right to hunt.
Lets be blunt here. How many of the so called Bill of Rights have the courts NOT allowed to be trampled under their jackbooted feet, just in the last few years?
I McCain Fiengold. Need I say more? If banning overt political speech isn't protected by the 1st then what the hell were the Founders on about anyway when they wrote this one?
II Nuff said. At least we are making progress on getting this one back. I am the NRA. Are you? Well why not?
III Ok, this one is holding up pretty well
IV Pitched battles rage over this one, whether it still stands depends on whether you think some of the more odious parts of PATRIOT withstand constituitional muster. But at least debatable by honest folk.
V They just kicked that one square in the nuts.
VI Don't make me laugh. Unless you can speak of ten year trials & appeals as 'speedy' or hand picked juries in venue shopped courts as "impartial jury". Or for that matter juries have been pretty much written out of the law with judges feeling free to set aside verdicts they don't like.
VII You can at least make an argument for this one standing.
VIII Mostly intact.
IX Ignored from day one.
X Ignored before the ink was even dry.
> First, could you please explain how public schools aren't compatibile
> with a republican form of government?
I already replied once, forgot to answer this part after getting sidetracked on the big vs small R part.
Simply that our government, especially considering the Bill of Rights, is based on the idea that folks should be free from government control to the greatest extent possible, no government mandated religion, no official government press, etc. How can you reconcile this principle with forcing every parent to subject their children to years of government mandated propaganda? Forget establishing a State religion! Hell, church only gets the little buggers a couple of hours on Sunday if they want to go. The schools get em five days a week and can send the cops over to pick em up if they don't wanna go.
The power to mandate what will and will not be taught to the next generation is far too much power to entrust to an instituition as corruptable as any Government. There are ample signs this power has already been much abused, who here believes any check could ever be placed on a government that won't obey it's own written Constituition?
No, the answer is to cut every responsibility that can be cut, leaving the remainder at the lowest level of the government possible. Education is a function that can be placed outside the government so it should be.
> And most ran on forced labor with illerate slaves doing all the work...
> And come to think of it, so did the United States, up until 1865...
> Hmmm. Not hard to have an advanced society when you can kidnap people
> and legally force them to do what you want....
So now we kidnap people, spend thirteen years crushing every spark of independent thought, ram in just enough technical skill to make em a good factory worker and... oops, we done gone and outsourced all of the factory drone jobs. So we stick em on welfare or some dead end job and make sure they are zoned out on mind numbing TV shows or intoxicating chemicals so they never realize they aren't Free anymore. Meanwhile the upper classes send their children to private schools so they will have a chance of becoming thinking citizens.
Somehow I fail to see where this is an improvement. At least with slavery it was all out in the open what was going on.
> First, could you please explain how public schools aren't compatibile
> with a republican (small 'r' -- let's not get all political part here)
> form of government?
Republican as in the Constituition's mandate that each state shall have "a Republican form of Government." As opposed to a Democracy for example, which the Founding Fathers rightly considered a perversion since it denies the Rule of Law. Or a kingdom or other un-free form of government. But this is going off topic.
> See my other post in this thread for my detailed reasons why a purely
> private system is flawed.
Ok, just did. Yes some private schools will be substandard but some will excel. If one believes in the Free Market and that parents will, in general, give a damn about their children then they will select for the better schools over time. Government schools will tend to all be teh same, poor. Government does nothing well except be a constant threat to liberty. The Founders believed government to be an evil, even if a necessary one. I agree.
> However, when dealing with the beaurocracy of any school system,
> public or private, parents who either don't care about their child's
> performance, parents who complain when you rightfully say that their
> child is performing badly, etc., the life of a modern school teacher
> isn't an easy one.
Which is making my point in a way. Today even the private schools are mostly just a mirror of the public system since they are heavily regulated. But those problems didn't always exist and it should not be taken as a core assumption that they must exist in a functioning system of education. Only by unleashing the full power of competition can the problem be solved.
> hmmm ... can you point to some countries where it has been tried?
The United States prior to the introduction of mandatory state run education.
> was it successful?
Yes.
> what is the literacy rate in those countries?
Much higher than it is now. And people could actually think back then, a nice bonus.
Consider this. Go locate a copy of the Federalist Papers. Read a couple and then come back and reread what I am about to say:
All of those papers ran in mass circulation newspapers of the day, the average person was both literate enough but also knowledgable enough on the issues of the day to read them, understand the arguments and could and did discuss them with their friends, neighbors and co-workers.
Think about the implications of that statement. Assuming a newspaper actually ran a series of articles of such weighty content, could more than 10% of their readers (already diminished by TV) understand them, let alone find others able to intelligently discuss them? This is the bitter harvest of several generations of public education.
Yes, a lot of people stopped school after the sixth or eighth grade and went to work, but never make the mistake of confusing what passed for an eighth grade education back then with how little actually useful knowledge one needs to learn today to get a college degree.
> Much as I despise the way public education is run in my country right
> now I'm loathe to give too much power to the parents...
Some must be sacrificed is all are to be saved. You can't have it both ways. Authority MUST follow responsibility. If parents are going to be responsible for their children they must have the authority to actually carry out the responsibility. Or you believe children are the property of the State and we should just do like Cuba and yank all the kids into barracks as soon as they can walk and be done with it.
I agree that there are people with children who shouldn't be honored with the word 'parent' but short of removing them from the corrosive environment there probably isn't much to be done. If the parents are defective products of the modern welfare state & education system it is going to be very hard to get useful citizens. Must admit I don't have a good answer to the problem. Wish I did. But the answer isn't to make EVERYONE a ward of the state and breed yet another generation of helpless dependents.
> One of the largest problems with education (at least American
> education) is the utter lack of critical thinking skills. American
> education is based in doctrines developed by Horace Mann at the
> beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Exactly. But public education will never address the problem, it IS the problem. It was created for the express purpose of turning out obedient little cogs to fit into the Industrial machine. They don't teach critical thinking because they understand as well as you probably do that a People who can think will be a Free People and this is the last thing they want. People who can think watch CNN and either giggle uncontrollable or just shake their heads sadly. (Not picking on just CNN, FoxNews, NYT, NPR, etc would equally fit.)
The powers that run the country like things as they are and are frankly afraid whether the country could survive if we were to have a hundred million or so actual Citizens. Personally I figure it would be absolute chaos for a few decades and then we would figure it out so say "Bring it on!"
First you need to be open minded enough to stop excluding the best solution out of hand. If you have a sucking chest wound you don't say "What is the best thing I can do, except stop the bleeding?"
Public schools don't work, can't work and aren't even compatible with a Republican form of Government.
Step one: board up every public school and college of education.
Seriously. The damage is beyond repairing, it is systemic and inherent in the concept of forced government education as we currently understand it. Therefore any attempts at 'reform' only prolong a real solution and are a bad idea.
Private schools all the way. Even if someone wants to send their kids to an Islamic fundamentalist madrassas. The Right to be Wrong is the #1 basic right because the second thee or me presumes to sit in judgement of a parent's choice we presume to 1) be their master and 2) be wise enough to make their decisions for them. If parents are going to be empowered to truly make educational decisions for their children we must accept decisions we don't approve of.
The only place for the State to intervene is in cases which could rightly be called abuse/neglect.
Once that policy decision is made, everything else follows. The idea that a math major isn't qualified to teach mathamatics is one that only a union operation with a government mandated monopoly could think up so there go the 'colleges of education' to be replaced with majors in their subject matter perhaps supplementing with a couple of courses in pedagogy.
Here is the secret. Teaching isn't particularly hard. All it requires is a knowledgable and reasonably patient master and an apprentice motivated to learn. Note the ancient usages there, that was intentional and intended to remind just how far back learning goes. They didn't need billions of words of academic text telling them how to do it, they just did it.
Intel spent over a decade spending billions to convince everyone that it it didn't have "Intel Inside" it was crap. Ok, they won that battle and it is now costing them the war.
What they didn't consider is just HOW the average person would perceive "Intel Inside", i.e. as an Intel processor running the Intel ISA. So when Intel itself tried to shift gears and say "no, we meant buy anything we throw out the front door" customers balked. The sad fact is that AMD understood the implications of what Intel's marketing dept had done to the marketplace better than Intel, hence AMD64.
Plus there is the practical problem. Unless you are doing scientific computing you don't see a benefit from Itanic because there are few applications running native and emulated performance sucks. The scientific computing set tends to be writing and compiling their own code so they are in a position to benefit, hence their interest in buying clusters of Itaniums. The DEC Alpha died a similar niche market death and unless Intel manages a major marketing miracle Itanium is fated for the same sad end.
Or has everyone forgotten Alpha? A totally kick ass CPU design killed by lack of natice apps? When Microsoft tried to push off the ia32 version of Office via emulation that pretty much killed it as everyone else decided emulation was good enough for a market that hadn't proved itself yet. So Alpha died in the mass market from underperformance and languished in large racks doing scientific computing until it could no longer sell enough volume to justify the R&D to continue ramping performance. Also pretty much the same story as Sparc.
> If your intent is to share, why purposely step on the toes of someone
> who may want to take you up on the offer?
If you want the poster child for the importance of the GPL, I nominate Cisco Systems/Linksys. Every time ESR says teh GPL isn't important somebody in the audience needs to hold up a WRT54G and wave it around. Linksys only released the source because of the GPL, and to be honest, the first release was half hearted. But now a whole community exists around modifying the firmware, which just has to be driving sales in a visible way. So now we get a tarball with EVERYTHING, including the mips toolchain, ready to go. The only part still missing is the network drivers and those belong to Broadcom.
> Sun spent millions of dollars of its own cold, hard, cash to buy ...There is simply no greater example of corporate commitment to the
> StarDivision...
>
> ideals > of open source.
No, Sun was pissed at Microsoft at the time and saw OO.o as the only way to hurt them. The Office monopoly is now what drives the Windows monopoly, not the other way around. Or at least that was Sun's thinking, and they are probably pretty close to the mark. Doesn't make em our friend though.
If you want proof, look at how they are always trying to tie OO.o to Java, forcing others, like RedHat who IS our friend, to spend tons of cash in an attempt to keep gcj close enough to be able to build it. In the end, OO.o is not the answer. Nobody really likes it, it is as big and bloated as MS Office and not a whole hell of a lot more stable. And sooner or later, and you can bookmark this post if you want, Sun will betray us over OO.o. There will be an attempt to fork and things will get a hell of a lot uglier than the XFree86 - X.org changeover. Patents will be wielded.
> Sun is without a doubt the biggest giver in open source history,
True. But that was long ago, in a different age. Sun changed, fear lead to hate and agression; the Dark Side.
> Open source does NOT mean GPL, or even GPL compatible.
No, but is does mean DSFG compatible and Sun hasn't figured that out and probably never will until it is far too late for them. And Solaris's license, while it squeeked by the DSFG test was specifically intended to exclude code exchange with any other existing project. So while they will lose little by it, they also won't gain much. So what was the point? Letting their diminishing userbase track bugs down is a win, but the code as currently shipped isn't complete enough to stand on it's own very well and can't be filled in by importing existing Free code. Plus what they posted as Open Solaris isn't exactly what they ship as Solaris so it isn't even all that useful as documentation for their users.
This is Darwin all over again, where a few diehard code jockeys will poke around because porting NetBSD to yet another game console isn't challenging anymore, but it won't be able to grow a viable user community.