There are solutions to the problems we have with government that don't involve the demolition of government. That kind of binary thinking leads to a binary world that is not a reasonable and natural world. If we work toward a government that functions reasonably (unlike the American government which has dived deeply into binary logic and rhetoric) then we can have reasonable roads paid for by reasonable taxes and kept up to reasonable quality by reasonable companies that make a reasonable profit. What we have instead in the opposite of all that, so let's change the topic of discussion how we can create a reasonable world: 1. Reasonable expectations about time, humanity and expenses 2. Work on the core, not the rind 3. Use, grow, support and teach a reasonable set of virtues 4. Set aside ideology and empty stances, replace them with thoughtful, coherent ideas
There is probably a #5, but I'll let you share yours.
These are the reason's that I supported Lawrence Lessig's original proposal to create a SuperPAC to help end SuperPACs. I've stopped listening to him now as his ideology has overtaken the project. This will be its downfall.
as to your basic "challenge", the computer sitting next to me is a core2 duo that I built in Thailand in 2007. I thas been running Fedora since then, and nothing else. I upgrade it when new ones are released using the upgrade tools. Still works, all works, runs everything fine, never broken once. Does that satisfy?
hf, if your challenge is so realistic then why are so many companies running various distros? Why have I run a variety (say 8 or 10) of different distros in 4 or 5 different countries with different hardware and never, ever had a driver problem with any hardware? What is it in your challenge that you use to set a use case that would overcome the basic needs of a business person (me) a university professor (also me) and a parent with a wife and 3 kids all running Linux for home work and school (obviously also me.)
I really don't get why you feel the need to get all trolly about it as well. I have heard you being reasonable, intelligent and someone with useful viewpoints that, while not my own, are still valuable. What you are doing above is none of that. Why bother to be like this when you impressed me most as a reasonable and intelligent commentator?
"Wumao brigade" The Chinese army of "fact checkers" who make sure that nothing "bad for the public" gets on the internet (or SMS when I was there, including Skype of course). The sad part is that most of them are unemployed Masters and PhD holders from mid to lower level Chinese universities who have formed the "Ant Tribe" and live in little concrete boxes with a bed, a desk and a computer on the desk. It is worse than you can imagine: they have tapped out their family's resources and have nothing to show for it, not even a factory job (they are over-educated for something like that).
hf, dear old friend, most of us who do use Linux are clueless about this driver problem you harp on about. We just don't see it. Now, someone has modded you down as a troll, which I think is unfair, because it is just you being you, and you really aren't a troll, you're just very tightly focused.
Robert A Wilson pointed out in his book "Final Trigger" that people have a basic instinct to find patterns, even where there are none. He pointed to a number of examples, but this over-focus of yours is my prime example for today: there is no "driver problem" with Linux, there is only your pattern rocognition brain sectors seeing what you "need" them to see.
I hope this helps, because you don't deserve to be modded troll, even though you did go a little over the top.
I'll meet that challenge: I live in Tampa, today the high will be 94, I will be outside working in and out of the sun. Depending on the level of output required I might (OMG~!!!) sweat. But, because I keep the house AC at 80 (I have AC in the "common" area of the house where our guests spend time: I have a small B&B), I don't get uncomfortable in heat and humidity.
I hired a guy to come and help me load (and take to the dump) some roofing I had ripped off yesterday. Halfway through the loading (say about 4pm) he had to stop, fire up his truck and sit in the AC for ten minutes before he could go on. This is the state of the nation.
It is not the heat, or the humidity: it is your personal habits, your laziness, your lifestyle that abjures contact with the natural atmosphere in preference to your "comfort." I often point out that when I was young, in the 50s and 60s, my family lived in tidewater VA where the summer humidity was "stinkin'." We had a single fan in the cieling above the stairs to the bedrooms. That was it. I am sorry that your abusive parents treated you like a fragile flower and you didn't build up the immunity to heat that is a built-in possibility for you. Sue them!
(My kids often complain now about having air conditioning set too low: they "escape" to the outside, just as I have done most of my adult life. I hate AC, and especially the closed windows and doors that go along with it.)
yes, but think: If you record that announcement ("this call may be...") and play it back at the beginning of your call with the company isn't there a good chance that the person on the other end of the line will assume a company phone glitch and ignore the information. That way they are still assuming that they are not being recorded even though they have been notified of the recording. We all need to begin to record any conversation with commercial reps in all situations, what they say is innane, stupid and often wrong. But it is actionable.
I was, years ago, a very skilled carpenter. What i have learned since I put my tools down is that now, almost 20 years later, I still know how to do those things, but I physically can't. My hands and body have lost the skill, the micromotor skills, the knowledge if you will, that they used to hold. I am not so much sad about it, but aware that many of the things that were trained into me are lost now that I am older and no longer practiced. The other thing I know is that those skills can come back quickly if I want to practice them again. But really, I don't. I do little projects here and there, but as I am seeing the "knowledge" come back, the project is finished and I go back to my desk and my classroom while the "knowledge" drains away again. Bittersweet.
Well, I use LO in the US, in an office environment with a hundred or so people, almost nobody knows that I'm not using MSO. What people don't seem to get is that most people would use a text editor daily if it said "Word" on the icon.
If I tell people that I am using a Linux desktop, they won't touch it. If I tell them I am just using a cool new desktop they try it out and like it. I don't bother to show them all the things I can do that they can't, don't baffle them, just keep work flowing and everything is good. The same thing with LO. Just bring up a document and let them write, no problem. Tell them it is different and they will freak.
Professor Alley here: I don't accept typed papers. "All papers must be handed in through Canvas>Assignments>Submit Now, You must check the box that says 'This paper is my work and my work alone and meets all standards for attribution explained in the syllabus for this class.' before being submitted through Turnitin.
Plagiarism is such a big problem that everything must go through a "similarity engine" that can compare the work with everything in all the databases, including google. The chromebook is perfect for all this, I begin with a first draft done in Canvas>Collaborations>GoogleDrive and then comoplete the work with the submission process listed above. Paper? We don't need no stinkin' trees!
As well: I am perfectly willing to cripple others for my ideological purposes. My Coordinator keeps sending me stuff in Outlook Notes. It's unreadable in anything other than Desktop Outlook Notes. I just tell her, "Sorry, your email is unreadable, could you resend it in a readable format?" She says: "Oh you always make it hard for me. " My reply? "And you make it impossible for me."
It is her job to communicate with me, I am using open standards, she is not, not my problem then is it?
But consider this other news from the NYT just yesterday (for me anyway): http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07... (It's paywalled after ten articles per month) Why bring this up? Well this American "Master's degree" is shocking from top to bottom: 1) a 14 page Master's thesis???? WTF, My Master's was 80 pages plus 10 pages of quant data that I made into a poster for better clarity 2) He used end notes for his thesis paper, five effin' pages of end notes? Most of which were "ibid?" 3) Who the hell was his supervisor? Looking at the sheer volume of copy and paste material and the sources (mostly googley available source stuff from gov or other reliable information providers) I can't believe even for a minute that anyone actually read that paper and didn't say "Whoa, this is word for word from... Oh, I see, he has an end note for the source, hmm, no quotation marks or other in-text tools like reporting verbs, phrases, hmmm, he'll need to make some changes.... hmmm, this paper is crap, but he has the sources to back it up and if he had done the attribution right it would be ok. Hmm, better send him an e-mail for a meeting tomorrrow!" How long did that take? 4) because of 3, the War College is also, maybe equally, to blame for this trash.
Again, what is the connection? This Masters is just like dozens, hundreds or thousands of Asian Masters degrees awarded every year. I saw many of them as a university Lecturer in Asia, and so we can consider this example, something we see as horrible plagiarism being not just not good but standard now in the Army War College as well as all over Asia. My friends, you are looking at the future of education. A world where a Master's degree will have a standardized test you have to take because you can't be trusted to do real thesis quality work because that paper exists just to get you a job. Most of my students today (but not all, thankfully not all) are in class with the goal of getting a piece of paper that gets them a job, that is their goal. They are supported in this by the American government, and governments all over the world who see testing as a way to standardize what people know. I'm pissed off, so I'll just shut up now....
This, my friends is the core of the issue. The solution, the one that worked in the 40s, 50s and 60s was a skilled literate and dedicated Civil Service. My father was a part of that civil service, he was skilled in providing and transporting petroleum products to the armed forces in combat and worked war games for the army, often traveling to the Pentagon to support the games. His background? WWII from Normandy to Berlin (the "fighting 25th") and the Korean "Police Action" from beginning to end as well. He retired when he was blocked from a promotion because the "General Staff must have university degrees" decision by Macnamara meant that he either had to go to Vietnam and get a battlefield promotion or quit. He quit. 6 months later he was in the civil service, doing what he had done before, just for more money.
Because of decisions made, and attitudes about public service that changed during Reagan, Bush (and not counteracted by anyone), the civil service has been derogated as incompetent, chair sitters, lazy, and mere office holders. Anyone with a sense of self-respect left, of course, and now we have this mess where we have revolving door public servants who only know the business line, can't wait to get back to the companies with their favors built up to where they can move up in the corporate hierarchy. Thank you Ronnie Raygun, what a brilliant effin' move.
So now we live in a world that we helped create because we voted that assshat into office twice, followed by his VP to continue his "legacy."
If you want to fix it we have to rebuild a real civil service. We have to compensate them for their abilities, just as the corporate world is compensated (and equally to corporate compensation). We have to pay for that service so that people will make it a career, instead of a lever for a high-paying corporate job. Who in our political landscape is addressing this? the Libertarians (HAHAHAHAHAH) the Repuiblicans (HAHAHAHAHHAAH) the Democrats (HAHAHAHAHAHHA)????? nobody. We have cut our governmental balls off and now we wonder why our joystick doesn't work.
Also note that this is a UK study, people there are already rather frugal, seldom have or use AriCon (a major energy drain) and have little to do to reduce through conservation. They also already are using small cars and other reductions to create a smaller footprint. Add to this their nanny state and the psychological result of relying on the gov to fix problems and I wouldn't expect to see much difference. The question is, what about in the US? We have groups here that glory in using massive quantities of fuel and electricity just to prove that they can. And others who have dropped off the grid to avoid being responsible for climageddon. Might show some more interesting data.
OK, I'll bite. I grew up in a small town, in the south (Virginia), where there were lots of problems. Black people lived in fear and danger of the system the laws and the police, for example. But I didn't, I was white, my dad was upstanding, a civil servant for the Army, retired warrior from WWII and Korea. We had a fine life. Now, the corruption was just what I described. We, white people, middle class people, land owners with a couple of cars and a couple couple of kids and dogs and cats and the MayberryRFD life were.... free! Everyone else could see the corrupt underbelly of racism, sexism, fascism, and all the rest of the underpinnings of our perfect society.
Now, here we are today. The rascism, sexism, fascism, capitalism, etc of the ruling class has become focused into a single small elite who have the sense of security that I grew up with, but the vast majority have lost out on it. We are now the disenfranchised, the cheated, the lied to, the herd being led to slaughter in the wars in ways that we never felt before.
The sad/bad part is that what many of us (and I am including myself in this out of a sense of fairness) want is a return to that past that really sucked for the victims and downtrodden of that time. And we are led to believe that it is those that were the downtrodden who are the cause of our own loss of power and happiness (and security). The people who are leading us are the ones who still have the power, and they dio it because they are also afraid of losing what they see that we have lost. They think that they very cleverly stole it from us, but they didn't. they just were too stupid to understand how to operate the world to maintain a real reasonable balanced system that could support all of us: they bought into the scarcity system because it was all they could understand.
So, here we are. Squabbling like the fools we are, about scarcity while surrounded by abundance. We have the money,time,ability and desire to do evberything that needs to be done, instead we waste it on bullshit like wars. Stupid humans!
Years ago I read Robert Anton Wilson's "Golden Apples of the Sun" trilogy, where he spears conspriacy theories in general by trying to fit them all into one ginormous eschaton conspiracy theory, for fun, drugs, rock 'n roll and wild sex (it was first published serially in Playboy, BTW). Anyway, following this trilogy he published a book called "Cosmic Trigger" where he explained his inner journey through Conspriacy Theory (CT) and where it landed him. I won't go through the whole thing, but the basic message (that I have been at pains to teach all my children, who are the only one's I can hold down long enough to explain a complicated coincept to) is that the human brain, because of its built-in pattern recognition abilities, is a conspiracy machine. Perhaps that is a bit strong, but the basic idea is that given random information we will find a pattern. Sometimes this is useful, sometimes it is garbage, but for the hunter/gatherer it was crucial to recognizing food for both hunting and gathering and feeding self and tribe. In the complex modern world, overwhelmed with information, we still must find the patterns to simplify our life and our responses to new input. This is the foundation of CT. CT is the use of this patterning ability as applied to random facts and information and creating patterns where there is none. For a Wilsonian example: Both Abraham Lincoln and JF Kennedy were assassinated on November 23rd, 99years apart, while sitting with their wife in a public space, by a single assassin. Clearly there must be conspiracy involved, the coincidence is too great to be without some underlying force that is crushing them. (by the way, there is a ton more fun stuff that can be added to this particular CT, but you already knew that didn't you?). Final point: CT is unbeatable because it is physically present in our brains. I have learned not to respond to people who are deep into a particular CT, it is hopeless. Time will heal it, or they will spend a life of misery suffering from their delusion. Example: my wife does some courier pickups two days a week. She picks up from a man who "discovered how to make hydrogen from water." He is being stopped from monetizing his amazing discovery by the oil and gas companies who are afraid of his discovery. They have kept him from getting financing for building the first commercial plant to make hydrogen fuel cells with his amazing (unopatented) process. I think simple reflection will show that the cost to the oil and gas companies of buying and using his process is miniscule compared to the gain they could make by controlling it through purchase. Obviously he hasn't "thought" of selling it to them.He just sees that there must be a conspiracy stopping him.
you were already at +5 so i'm just throwing in a big "yeah, hell yeah" on this. I am ashamed that I had to read this far down to find someone who knows what a "great" programmer really is.
OK, OK, Let's calm down, boys and girls. Back up a minute and think about the full panoply or facts involved in the questions here. First: Teachers get paid shit for their masters degree plus of education Second: Teachers have crazy hours impressed on them through an evaluation system that you would not want to contemplate. If you are not working 50-70 hours a week you aren't keeping up with your responsibilities. Trying to get tenure with bad evals is impossible. Third: The evals are not based on skilled evaluators who actually watch and eval what you are doing, no, most of the eval comes from students. Students who have a different world view than their parents or the education system. Fourth: teachers are highly restricted by the ir contracts in terms of what they can do at work and outside of work. How many teachers have been fired for being gay or lesbian (obviously not on the face of it, because that would reflect on the super who hired, but never the less)? Fifth: Look at the numbers for teacher turn-over up until the last unemployment increase, people don't stay teachers by choice anymore.
Tenure is a dead issue really. The only people who want it shouldn't have it and the people who don't care are leaving anyway. The reason schools give it so easily is to try to hold on to teachers who might end up being good, but will leave without it (or anyway). So let's get off our high horses and recognize that the issues that we face in the education of ourselves and our young are greater than this issue, which is relatively small in the larger view.
Yes, and this: Living wage varies from area to area. Parts of Washington state have a high living wage, parts are similar to other agricultural regions in the country. Seattle has a very high living wage standard. Still, it will help and will provide an impetus for one or all of the knock-on effects: 1) upward pressure on wages for all working to middle-middle income people 2) downward pressure on new hiring of working to middle-middle class people 3) increase in/ decrease in short hours (so-called part-time workers) workers to reduce benefit load on business 4) conservative screams and howls of suffering and pain (esp. from the very rich who it affects not at all) 5) general increase in personal spending in Seattle which will help to support the very businesses that scream the loudest about how it is killing them (lookin' at you Walmart)
Overall, working people will benefit (probably), business will NOT suffer, and the economy of Seattle will benefit. Even if business does take a small hit it will be offset by worker dissatisfaction improvements (less problems in inventory stealing, petty and random acts of destruction and other negative worker actions that businesses don't even want to consider other than as "cost of doing business). Win-win
When I lived in the US mostly (60-80s) I would have thought that more than 2 parties would be chaos. Then I lived: Holland: a gazillion parties, from greens, to commies to libertarians to pastafarians to white supremacists to religious conservatives to who knows what else. Absolutely fantastic! Love, love loved it, real republic with a complete spectrum of interests that battle it out in public. People switch sides, change sentiment, have a chance to talk about crazy ideas and think, think think.
China: one party. The trains run on time, and fast, and the focus is on giving the people what they want: toys toys toys for kids and adults. The government knows what you want, really they do: toys and more toys and cheap toys that break but then you can just get more, all supported by western economies.
Thailand: two parties. One party is the middle class beaurocrats, mostly in the capital city who want a strong middle class and are supported by the armed forces (and thereby America) and the King (and thereby, secretly, by some of the rich and powerful entrenched power and education elites). The other side is the poor, rural and uneducated people who fall for schemes like: "two cows in every backyard" and "$.50 per visit hospital charges" and other stupid public policy ploys to get votes from people who can't do math (and also supported by the remainder of the wealthy power elite who see the aged king as a power vacuum that they can exploit, as well as the police force and therefore the drug trade, casino and prostitution trades).
While I am sure that there are disfunctional examples of the multiparty model (Greece, Italy and others no doubt) the thing I saw and see is the importance of an informed electorate. It is easier to control the terms of the discourse if you control the information being debated in public forums. This is why we need an open internet and why the FCC ruling is so very important to our political discourse.
I came back to the US 3 years ago, and frankly, we are stupider than I thought possible. ALL the "news " programs are lame and single POV. From the far left to the far right there is no real room for intelligent discussion. It is probably NOT the number of parties, but that has supported a stupidification of our political discourse by making it more polar.
We need to choose a small number of very important issues, such as net neutrality and campaign finance reform. and focus on these. Anything that pulls us away from the core will just weaken our strength. I am not saying that we need to forget about the other issues, just that if we try to make a tidy package of them we will lose the war while busily winning useless, unfocused battles.
This is exactly how I invest: I put my money where my mouth is. I should note that this has made it possible to put a good down payment on the house we live in two years ago and to rebuild that investment since. And, yes, I did own some stock in Tesla, saw that with the current volatility it would drop more than reasonable for its value, sold it and will buy back in after the drop bottoms (next week). Might even pick up and extra share or two from the dif.
Well this sounds like only a small part of what CMS like Canvas provide (www.canvas.instructure.com), so I can see where this might be a move to begin to prepare to consider making an offer to purchase something like Canvas, or maybe not. Seriously, when things like Canvas are available for free, using the same tools (Google drive) plus a ton of other things, why bother with something that doesn't do things like your attendance, your grading, your messaging (linked to your email, probably what Gedu is doing too), your portfolio, plus submission through Turnitin to check for plagiarism. Really Google?
Slashdot Mirror
There are solutions to the problems we have with government that don't involve the demolition of government. That kind of binary thinking leads to a binary world that is not a reasonable and natural world. If we work toward a government that functions reasonably (unlike the American government which has dived deeply into binary logic and rhetoric) then we can have reasonable roads paid for by reasonable taxes and kept up to reasonable quality by reasonable companies that make a reasonable profit. What we have instead in the opposite of all that, so let's change the topic of discussion how we can create a reasonable world:
1. Reasonable expectations about time, humanity and expenses
2. Work on the core, not the rind
3. Use, grow, support and teach a reasonable set of virtues
4. Set aside ideology and empty stances, replace them with thoughtful, coherent ideas
There is probably a #5, but I'll let you share yours.
These are the reason's that I supported Lawrence Lessig's original proposal to create a SuperPAC to help end SuperPACs. I've stopped listening to him now as his ideology has overtaken the project. This will be its downfall.
as to your basic "challenge", the computer sitting next to me is a core2 duo that I built in Thailand in 2007. I thas been running Fedora since then, and nothing else. I upgrade it when new ones are released using the upgrade tools. Still works, all works, runs everything fine, never broken once. Does that satisfy?
hf, if your challenge is so realistic then why are so many companies running various distros? Why have I run a variety (say 8 or 10) of different distros in 4 or 5 different countries with different hardware and never, ever had a driver problem with any hardware? What is it in your challenge that you use to set a use case that would overcome the basic needs of a business person (me) a university professor (also me) and a parent with a wife and 3 kids all running Linux for home work and school (obviously also me.)
I really don't get why you feel the need to get all trolly about it as well. I have heard you being reasonable, intelligent and someone with useful viewpoints that, while not my own, are still valuable. What you are doing above is none of that. Why bother to be like this when you impressed me most as a reasonable and intelligent commentator?
"Wumao brigade"
The Chinese army of "fact checkers" who make sure that nothing "bad for the public" gets on the internet (or SMS when I was there, including Skype of course). The sad part is that most of them are unemployed Masters and PhD holders from mid to lower level Chinese universities who have formed the "Ant Tribe" and live in little concrete boxes with a bed, a desk and a computer on the desk. It is worse than you can imagine: they have tapped out their family's resources and have nothing to show for it, not even a factory job (they are over-educated for something like that).
hf, dear old friend, most of us who do use Linux are clueless about this driver problem you harp on about. We just don't see it. Now, someone has modded you down as a troll, which I think is unfair, because it is just you being you, and you really aren't a troll, you're just very tightly focused.
Robert A Wilson pointed out in his book "Final Trigger" that people have a basic instinct to find patterns, even where there are none. He pointed to a number of examples, but this over-focus of yours is my prime example for today: there is no "driver problem" with Linux, there is only your pattern rocognition brain sectors seeing what you "need" them to see.
I hope this helps, because you don't deserve to be modded troll, even though you did go a little over the top.
I'll meet that challenge:
I live in Tampa, today the high will be 94, I will be outside working in and out of the sun. Depending on the level of output required I might (OMG~!!!) sweat. But, because I keep the house AC at 80 (I have AC in the "common" area of the house where our guests spend time: I have a small B&B), I don't get uncomfortable in heat and humidity.
I hired a guy to come and help me load (and take to the dump) some roofing I had ripped off yesterday. Halfway through the loading (say about 4pm) he had to stop, fire up his truck and sit in the AC for ten minutes before he could go on. This is the state of the nation.
It is not the heat, or the humidity: it is your personal habits, your laziness, your lifestyle that abjures contact with the natural atmosphere in preference to your "comfort." I often point out that when I was young, in the 50s and 60s, my family lived in tidewater VA where the summer humidity was "stinkin'." We had a single fan in the cieling above the stairs to the bedrooms. That was it. I am sorry that your abusive parents treated you like a fragile flower and you didn't build up the immunity to heat that is a built-in possibility for you. Sue them!
(My kids often complain now about having air conditioning set too low: they "escape" to the outside, just as I have done most of my adult life. I hate AC, and especially the closed windows and doors that go along with it.)
yes, but think:
If you record that announcement ("this call may be...") and play it back at the beginning of your call with the company isn't there a good chance that the person on the other end of the line will assume a company phone glitch and ignore the information. That way they are still assuming that they are not being recorded even though they have been notified of the recording.
We all need to begin to record any conversation with commercial reps in all situations, what they say is innane, stupid and often wrong. But it is actionable.
I was, years ago, a very skilled carpenter. What i have learned since I put my tools down is that now, almost 20 years later, I still know how to do those things, but I physically can't. My hands and body have lost the skill, the micromotor skills, the knowledge if you will, that they used to hold. I am not so much sad about it, but aware that many of the things that were trained into me are lost now that I am older and no longer practiced.
The other thing I know is that those skills can come back quickly if I want to practice them again. But really, I don't. I do little projects here and there, but as I am seeing the "knowledge" come back, the project is finished and I go back to my desk and my classroom while the "knowledge" drains away again.
Bittersweet.
Well, I use LO in the US, in an office environment with a hundred or so people, almost nobody knows that I'm not using MSO. What people don't seem to get is that most people would use a text editor daily if it said "Word" on the icon.
If I tell people that I am using a Linux desktop, they won't touch it. If I tell them I am just using a cool new desktop they try it out and like it. I don't bother to show them all the things I can do that they can't, don't baffle them, just keep work flowing and everything is good. The same thing with LO. Just bring up a document and let them write, no problem. Tell them it is different and they will freak.
stupid humans
sorry, missed that close quote, damn it!
Professor Alley here: I don't accept typed papers.
"All papers must be handed in through Canvas>Assignments>Submit Now, You must check the box that says 'This paper is my work and my work alone and meets all standards for attribution explained in the syllabus for this class.' before being submitted through Turnitin.
Plagiarism is such a big problem that everything must go through a "similarity engine" that can compare the work with everything in all the databases, including google. The chromebook is perfect for all this, I begin with a first draft done in Canvas>Collaborations>GoogleDrive and then comoplete the work with the submission process listed above. Paper? We don't need no stinkin' trees!
As well: I am perfectly willing to cripple others for my ideological purposes. My Coordinator keeps sending me stuff in Outlook Notes. It's unreadable in anything other than Desktop Outlook Notes. I just tell her, "Sorry, your email is unreadable, could you resend it in a readable format?" She says: "Oh you always make it hard for me. " My reply? "And you make it impossible for me."
It is her job to communicate with me, I am using open standards, she is not, not my problem then is it?
But consider this other news from the NYT just yesterday (for me anyway):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...
(It's paywalled after ten articles per month)
Why bring this up? Well this American "Master's degree" is shocking from top to bottom:
1) a 14 page Master's thesis???? WTF, My Master's was 80 pages plus 10 pages of quant data that I made into a poster for better clarity
2) He used end notes for his thesis paper, five effin' pages of end notes? Most of which were "ibid?"
3) Who the hell was his supervisor? Looking at the sheer volume of copy and paste material and the sources (mostly googley available source stuff from gov or other reliable information providers) I can't believe even for a minute that anyone actually read that paper and didn't say "Whoa, this is word for word from... Oh, I see, he has an end note for the source, hmm, no quotation marks or other in-text tools like reporting verbs, phrases, hmmm, he'll need to make some changes.... hmmm, this paper is crap, but he has the sources to back it up and if he had done the attribution right it would be ok. Hmm, better send him an e-mail for a meeting tomorrrow!" How long did that take?
4) because of 3, the War College is also, maybe equally, to blame for this trash.
Again, what is the connection? This Masters is just like dozens, hundreds or thousands of Asian Masters degrees awarded every year. I saw many of them as a university Lecturer in Asia, and so we can consider this example, something we see as horrible plagiarism being not just not good but standard now in the Army War College as well as all over Asia. My friends, you are looking at the future of education. A world where a Master's degree will have a standardized test you have to take because you can't be trusted to do real thesis quality work because that paper exists just to get you a job. Most of my students today (but not all, thankfully not all) are in class with the goal of getting a piece of paper that gets them a job, that is their goal.
They are supported in this by the American government, and governments all over the world who see testing as a way to standardize what people know.
I'm pissed off, so I'll just shut up now....
This, my friends is the core of the issue. The solution, the one that worked in the 40s, 50s and 60s was a skilled literate and dedicated Civil Service. My father was a part of that civil service, he was skilled in providing and transporting petroleum products to the armed forces in combat and worked war games for the army, often traveling to the Pentagon to support the games. His background? WWII from Normandy to Berlin (the "fighting 25th") and the Korean "Police Action" from beginning to end as well. He retired when he was blocked from a promotion because the "General Staff must have university degrees" decision by Macnamara meant that he either had to go to Vietnam and get a battlefield promotion or quit. He quit.
6 months later he was in the civil service, doing what he had done before, just for more money.
Because of decisions made, and attitudes about public service that changed during Reagan, Bush (and not counteracted by anyone), the civil service has been derogated as incompetent, chair sitters, lazy, and mere office holders. Anyone with a sense of self-respect left, of course, and now we have this mess where we have revolving door public servants who only know the business line, can't wait to get back to the companies with their favors built up to where they can move up in the corporate hierarchy. Thank you Ronnie Raygun, what a brilliant effin' move.
So now we live in a world that we helped create because we voted that assshat into office twice, followed by his VP to continue his "legacy."
If you want to fix it we have to rebuild a real civil service. We have to compensate them for their abilities, just as the corporate world is compensated (and equally to corporate compensation). We have to pay for that service so that people will make it a career, instead of a lever for a high-paying corporate job. Who in our political landscape is addressing this? the Libertarians (HAHAHAHAHAH) the Repuiblicans (HAHAHAHAHHAAH) the Democrats (HAHAHAHAHAHHA)????? nobody. We have cut our governmental balls off and now we wonder why our joystick doesn't work.
Stupid Humans!!!
Also note that this is a UK study, people there are already rather frugal, seldom have or use AriCon (a major energy drain) and have little to do to reduce through conservation. They also already are using small cars and other reductions to create a smaller footprint.
Add to this their nanny state and the psychological result of relying on the gov to fix problems and I wouldn't expect to see much difference. The question is, what about in the US? We have groups here that glory in using massive quantities of fuel and electricity just to prove that they can. And others who have dropped off the grid to avoid being responsible for climageddon. Might show some more interesting data.
Barter
OK, I'll bite. .... free!
I grew up in a small town, in the south (Virginia), where there were lots of problems. Black people lived in fear and danger of the system the laws and the police, for example. But I didn't, I was white, my dad was upstanding, a civil servant for the Army, retired warrior from WWII and Korea. We had a fine life.
Now, the corruption was just what I described. We, white people, middle class people, land owners with a couple of cars and a couple couple of kids and dogs and cats and the MayberryRFD life were
Everyone else could see the corrupt underbelly of racism, sexism, fascism, and all the rest of the underpinnings of our perfect society.
Now, here we are today. The rascism, sexism, fascism, capitalism, etc of the ruling class has become focused into a single small elite who have the sense of security that I grew up with, but the vast majority have lost out on it. We are now the disenfranchised, the cheated, the lied to, the herd being led to slaughter in the wars in ways that we never felt before.
The sad/bad part is that what many of us (and I am including myself in this out of a sense of fairness) want is a return to that past that really sucked for the victims and downtrodden of that time. And we are led to believe that it is those that were the downtrodden who are the cause of our own loss of power and happiness (and security). The people who are leading us are the ones who still have the power, and they dio it because they are also afraid of losing what they see that we have lost. They think that they very cleverly stole it from us, but they didn't. they just were too stupid to understand how to operate the world to maintain a real reasonable balanced system that could support all of us: they bought into the scarcity system because it was all they could understand.
So, here we are. Squabbling like the fools we are, about scarcity while surrounded by abundance. We have the money,time,ability and desire to do evberything that needs to be done, instead we waste it on bullshit like wars. Stupid humans!
Years ago I read Robert Anton Wilson's "Golden Apples of the Sun" trilogy, where he spears conspriacy theories in general by trying to fit them all into one ginormous eschaton conspiracy theory, for fun, drugs, rock 'n roll and wild sex (it was first published serially in Playboy, BTW). Anyway, following this trilogy he published a book called "Cosmic Trigger" where he explained his inner journey through Conspriacy Theory (CT) and where it landed him. I won't go through the whole thing, but the basic message (that I have been at pains to teach all my children, who are the only one's I can hold down long enough to explain a complicated coincept to) is that the human brain, because of its built-in pattern recognition abilities, is a conspiracy machine.
Perhaps that is a bit strong, but the basic idea is that given random information we will find a pattern. Sometimes this is useful, sometimes it is garbage, but for the hunter/gatherer it was crucial to recognizing food for both hunting and gathering and feeding self and tribe. In the complex modern world, overwhelmed with information, we still must find the patterns to simplify our life and our responses to new input. This is the foundation of CT.
CT is the use of this patterning ability as applied to random facts and information and creating patterns where there is none. For a Wilsonian example: Both Abraham Lincoln and JF Kennedy were assassinated on November 23rd, 99years apart, while sitting with their wife in a public space, by a single assassin. Clearly there must be conspiracy involved, the coincidence is too great to be without some underlying force that is crushing them. (by the way, there is a ton more fun stuff that can be added to this particular CT, but you already knew that didn't you?).
Final point: CT is unbeatable because it is physically present in our brains. I have learned not to respond to people who are deep into a particular CT, it is hopeless. Time will heal it, or they will spend a life of misery suffering from their delusion. Example: my wife does some courier pickups two days a week. She picks up from a man who "discovered how to make hydrogen from water." He is being stopped from monetizing his amazing discovery by the oil and gas companies who are afraid of his discovery. They have kept him from getting financing for building the first commercial plant to make hydrogen fuel cells with his amazing (unopatented) process. I think simple reflection will show that the cost to the oil and gas companies of buying and using his process is miniscule compared to the gain they could make by controlling it through purchase. Obviously he hasn't "thought" of selling it to them.He just sees that there must be a conspiracy stopping him.
you were already at +5 so i'm just throwing in a big "yeah, hell yeah" on this. I am ashamed that I had to read this far down to find someone who knows what a "great" programmer really is.
OK, OK,
Let's calm down, boys and girls. Back up a minute and think about the full panoply or facts involved in the questions here.
First: Teachers get paid shit for their masters degree plus of education
Second: Teachers have crazy hours impressed on them through an evaluation system that you would not want to contemplate. If you are not working 50-70 hours a week you aren't keeping up with your responsibilities. Trying to get tenure with bad evals is impossible.
Third: The evals are not based on skilled evaluators who actually watch and eval what you are doing, no, most of the eval comes from students. Students who have a different world view than their parents or the education system.
Fourth: teachers are highly restricted by the ir contracts in terms of what they can do at work and outside of work. How many teachers have been fired for being gay or lesbian (obviously not on the face of it, because that would reflect on the super who hired, but never the less)?
Fifth: Look at the numbers for teacher turn-over up until the last unemployment increase, people don't stay teachers by choice anymore.
Tenure is a dead issue really. The only people who want it shouldn't have it and the people who don't care are leaving anyway. The reason schools give it so easily is to try to hold on to teachers who might end up being good, but will leave without it (or anyway).
So let's get off our high horses and recognize that the issues that we face in the education of ourselves and our young are greater than this issue, which is relatively small in the larger view.
Yes, and this:
Living wage varies from area to area. Parts of Washington state have a high living wage, parts are similar to other agricultural regions in the country. Seattle has a very high living wage standard. Still, it will help and will provide an impetus for one or all of the knock-on effects:
1) upward pressure on wages for all working to middle-middle income people
2) downward pressure on new hiring of working to middle-middle class people
3) increase in/ decrease in short hours (so-called part-time workers) workers to reduce benefit load on business
4) conservative screams and howls of suffering and pain (esp. from the very rich who it affects not at all)
5) general increase in personal spending in Seattle which will help to support the very businesses that scream the loudest about how it is killing them (lookin' at you Walmart)
Overall, working people will benefit (probably), business will NOT suffer, and the economy of Seattle will benefit. Even if business does take a small hit it will be offset by worker dissatisfaction improvements (less problems in inventory stealing, petty and random acts of destruction and other negative worker actions that businesses don't even want to consider other than as "cost of doing business).
Win-win
Isn't the PS3 running an IBM P6 ppc chip?
When I lived in the US mostly (60-80s) I would have thought that more than 2 parties would be chaos. Then I lived:
Holland: a gazillion parties, from greens, to commies to libertarians to pastafarians to white supremacists to religious conservatives to who knows what else. Absolutely fantastic! Love, love loved it, real republic with a complete spectrum of interests that battle it out in public. People switch sides, change sentiment, have a chance to talk about crazy ideas and think, think think.
China: one party. The trains run on time, and fast, and the focus is on giving the people what they want: toys toys toys for kids and adults. The government knows what you want, really they do: toys and more toys and cheap toys that break but then you can just get more, all supported by western economies.
Thailand: two parties. One party is the middle class beaurocrats, mostly in the capital city who want a strong middle class and are supported by the armed forces (and thereby America) and the King (and thereby, secretly, by some of the rich and powerful entrenched power and education elites). The other side is the poor, rural and uneducated people who fall for schemes like: "two cows in every backyard" and "$.50 per visit hospital charges" and other stupid public policy ploys to get votes from people who can't do math (and also supported by the remainder of the wealthy power elite who see the aged king as a power vacuum that they can exploit, as well as the police force and therefore the drug trade, casino and prostitution trades).
While I am sure that there are disfunctional examples of the multiparty model (Greece, Italy and others no doubt) the thing I saw and see is the importance of an informed electorate. It is easier to control the terms of the discourse if you control the information being debated in public forums. This is why we need an open internet and why the FCC ruling is so very important to our political discourse.
I came back to the US 3 years ago, and frankly, we are stupider than I thought possible. ALL the "news " programs are lame and single POV. From the far left to the far right there is no real room for intelligent discussion. It is probably NOT the number of parties, but that has supported a stupidification of our political discourse by making it more polar.
We need to choose a small number of very important issues, such as net neutrality and campaign finance reform. and focus on these. Anything that pulls us away from the core will just weaken our strength. I am not saying that we need to forget about the other issues, just that if we try to make a tidy package of them we will lose the war while busily winning useless, unfocused battles.
This is exactly how I invest: I put my money where my mouth is. I should note that this has made it possible to put a good down payment on the house we live in two years ago and to rebuild that investment since. And, yes, I did own some stock in Tesla, saw that with the current volatility it would drop more than reasonable for its value, sold it and will buy back in after the drop bottoms (next week). Might even pick up and extra share or two from the dif.
Well this sounds like only a small part of what CMS like Canvas provide (www.canvas.instructure.com), so I can see where this might be a move to begin to prepare to consider making an offer to purchase something like Canvas, or maybe not.
Seriously, when things like Canvas are available for free, using the same tools (Google drive) plus a ton of other things, why bother with something that doesn't do things like your attendance, your grading, your messaging (linked to your email, probably what Gedu is doing too), your portfolio, plus submission through Turnitin to check for plagiarism. Really Google?