Modding your XBox is not intrinsically illegal; you can take out the innards and put it into a new case and nobody can stop you.
When people talk about "modding the XBox" though, they're talking about specific modifications that, among other things, bypass the copyright controls contained in the XBox. This is a violation of the DMCA in the US, quite clear-cut.
While I believe that such controls being on the XBox in the first place is immoral, my personal opinion has little bearing on the legal status, which is quite clear.
So, "modding the XBox" isn't illegal, but "modding the XBox" is. Two different senses of that phrase. Don't let others snow you with the difference; I assure you it won't confuse a judge.
1. with xbox media center on your 2. modded xbox, install this script ooba and then 3. you get access to Comedy Central [and other things].
OK, but you do realize this is a completely irrelevant "counterargument", as TiVo's service will be 1. not require an installation well beyond the average person's capability, 2. run on legal, off-the-shelf hardware, and 3. access content legally?
I mean, come on, the fact that you can buy Roluxes in a back alley in Hong Kong hardly proves that Rolex's business model is fatally flawed!
I'll echo the "Python" recommendations, tempered by the fact that a Rails-like framework may be a good idea. On the other hand, it may involve learning too many things at once; I've been web developing for just shy of ten years now and it's hard for me to feel how hard this stuff is. But take Javascript, HTML, Ruby, the Rails framework, and a couple of things tossed in for good measure, and it may prove a bit much. (Or not. I happily defer to anyone who has actually tried to teach programming starting people from scratch from Rails. But I think I'd start with a tech that is made out of less acronym soup.)
But what I really wanted to comment on was:
We have been toying with the idea of having the introduction course be in PHP or Ruby on Rails; but are not convinced that they lead well into higher level languages.
Bwa? Check your terminology. Ruby, Python, Perl, and the like are the highest level languages there are for general use at the moment. They can hardly fail to lead well into themselves.
(PHP is deliberately not in that list. I would not start them there. PHP requires immense discipline to use properly and there's little gain to be had for that discipline. I'd say it's the closest candidate for a modern heir to the "You can't teach a Basic programmer how to program" meme from Dykstra; in some sense it's not a "bad language" but it definately teaches a lot of very bad habits, with a community that enables this behavior. Your students should not end up on Bugtraq with their school project.)
In fact, you'll be jumping those kids ahead of a lot of Old Farts (TM) who still look down on those languages for a host of misguided reasons and insist on using C, not because it's the best choice for some good reason (like a cross-platform library, for which it is still King), but because they honestly think it's the best choice.
Your danger is that if the kids are ever presented with C, they'll wonder why the hell anyone does things in such a baroque fashion and they'll refuse to be placed into that sort of bondage. Me, I consider that progress, but YMMV.
I had a Korg X5, the same innards as the venerable (and I believe considered "classic") 05/W series in the mid-90s.
Only in modern times am I hearing music from consoles/computers that was as good as what I heard from that machine, and most of the time the modern music isn't dynamically generated.
Tie Fighter and the opening to Day of the Tentacle stand out as excellent game music. The former has wonderful orchestral arrangements, and the latter has this solo clarinet that almost sounded like someone was actually playing one. (My clarinet patch was good, but that arrangement made it even better.)
Music has, for all the press, been pretty neglected by modern times. We have the tech for some great dynamic music, but we just get MP3s instead; certainly nicer than FM synth, but lacking for many games.
This thing is targetted at the Open Source community like the TiVo is targetted at the open source community.
(This being Slashdot, where anything more subtle than a marching band tends to be missed by a disturbing number of people, I'll spell that out: "Not at all.")
In psychology it's so bad, due to the nature of people and the subject, that every Abnormal Psychology book I've seen, and the class I took, starts with a warning abouth the syndrome; most psychological disorders are defined in rather normal terms, and at any moment, most of us have at least one symptom that shows up in the DSM. It's the confluence of multiple symptoms (usually) that persist and cause problems for the person that defines a true problem, but if you're not paying attention to those caveats (or they don't reassure you)...
Medical Student Syndrome isn't going to kill you, but it can cause some stress at a time in your life when you really don't need it. (No joke.)
If you can't afford the equipment to build a distiller, a pre-steam era technology that is largely a few carefully selected pipes and two pots, you're probably doomed anyhow.
If you can't afford the energy to run that distiller, you are doomed if you're trying space-flight at the same time.
Plots based on how moronic the main characters (proxying for the writers own moronicity) are are annoying, sci-fi or otherwise.
Is it compelling? Does it offer anything significant over what I've already got? The Dreamcast gave me a big "No" on that score.
Wow. What exactly were you looking for? The Dreamcast had one of the best starting line ups in American history, and to call it a step up over the Playstation One is selling it extremely short. (PS1 -> DC was a much bigger step than DC -> PS2; I'd say about 3:1, though that's an inherently subjective number.)
Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, Sega NFL 2K, and to a lesser degree House Of The Dead (although there was a lot of hype at the time) and Powerstone were all strong release games, and most of the rest were at least passable. The first one in particular still holds up pretty well, I think, and I still play it.
(Now, if your thing is RPGs, that statement does make sense. Skies of Arcadia and Grandia 2 are both quite strong, but that's nearly the end of the list and neither are release games.)
There aren't many consoles with a better release line up, not counting reverse compatibility. (In which case the PS/2 and various GameBoy incarnations clean up, but that's not really the spirit here.)
But... consider that the reason that occurs is the pressures caused by the distribution mechanism, which strongly favor$ mainstream distribution over niche.
This starts out from day one depending on BitTorrent, which strongly (though not quite) entirely flattens the costs to the creator for mainstream vs. niche.
There is reason to hope this will never suffer that fate, as long as the same people stay in charge, because it can afford to stay niche. Then again, if they get too experimental and successful with the advertising, it could replicate the G4 slide.
Only one way to find out. Worth keeping an eye on. A lot of people have been saying this is the path... soon we'll have hard data.
Looking at your other reply, I can already guess you're going to say that's not the same as teaching in a public school. True, but it's still proof that teaching is hardly this mystical black art that only those trained in its mysteries are qualified to speak to and nobody else possibly stands a chance in the face of its mighty challenge. Maybe teaching is that hard for you, but it isn't for the rest of us, and you don't get to lock us out of this discussion that easily, by Appeal to (your own self-proclaimed, no less!) Authority, which a mighty educator such as yourself may recognize as one of the logical fallacies.
I might be able to make that deal. It doesn't seem to be in the cards, though, and I'd want specifics, but that's just life.
AFAIK homeschooling is only a local phenomenon?
Well, it is sort of the default state of affairs. Try looking for proof that institutional schooling is better... and I mean proof, in the scientific sense. I've come up pretty short. We seemed to have just sort of skipped that step, and now that we're in our, what, fourth, fifth generation of institutional schooling, it's simply religiously unquestioned, complete with persecution of heretics.
Personally, "institutional, one-size fits all schooling is a Good Idea" is on my short list of things that our grandchildren will look back on and say how did they believe that? By the nature of the list, I can't be sure of it, or any of the other entries, since I live in the Now myself and I don't share their perspective, but history shows the list isn't empty and I'd lay money I'm not wrong on all counts... (It's got about four or five things on it.)
Well, now you're demonstrating an inability to read, since I never did claim they were the same, and now you're not impressing me for other reasons. I merely said we're qualified to have opinions, not that this is the exact same as being experienced.
I'm not sure you're qualified to hold opinions at all.
Besides, you picked a bad guy to say that to. I taught in college, with all the formal training that implies, and frankly, my first day seemed to go pretty well. In fact, most professors have no "training" to speak of, and quite a lot of them do quite well. (And quite a lot with the training do quite poorly, so... it would take more science to unravel this question fully.)
If you mean a real teacher, with experience "in the field", I'm listening, but I'd point out that we've all been on the receiving end of education so we're all qualified to at least have opinions based on our own experience and you aren't entitled to a monopoly on the subject.
If you mean an "education expert", who might be teaching teaching in college, I'll stop talking out my ass when they do, and move beyond considering "science" a four-letter word. (There actually is some good work in the field, but I see no evidence that it is making its way out into practice in any significant way, against the stiff competition of politically-driven fads.)
don't homeschool (no parent can possibly become an expert on a multitude of topics
You think teachers are experts?
Forget what you know, forget what I might say because maybe I'm a biased source. Think of your local "teaching college", go to their web page, and look up their curriculum.
In order to teach high school math, a teacher must learn... high school math. (At my local school, they do get axiomatic geometry as their last course, but by then the damage of thinking they know math is long done and I'd lay money the vast majority of them just slide through.)
In order to teach high school physics, a teacher must learn... high school physics.
In order to teach high school English, a teacher must learn... high school English.
Teachers are not experts; they spend a lot of time learning "how to teach" from people who wouldn't know science if it bit them in the ass, and little more than the bare minimum learning the subjects they are supposed to teach. To be "experts", I'd expect they'd need to progress at least 20-30 college credits beyond anything they would need to teach high school, and that is way more than required. Therefore, most don't do it.
Of course, nobody stops the teachers from getting more into the subject, but nobody will encourage it, nobody will give them any/much additional credit for it, and it won't help them much anyhow.
If you actually retained the information you got from high school (which, incidentally, is my vote for the thing to change in schools... stop teaching children they can just slack off because 4th grade is pretty much the same as 3rd grade...), you're perfectly qualified to be a teacher. In fact, you may well be educated more than many teachers since there is no guarantee that they are that qualified; they may have slid through school too. (Indeed, in my experience, there's no guarantee they're qualified to teach the subject they are supposed to be teaching....)
It has been my experience that people who dismiss home schooling on Slashdot seem to do so with highly, highly unrealistic views of teachers that are, frankly, empirically wrong. This is part of why to date none of them have changed my mind on the topic, I suppose. In the unlikely event I have children, they are so homeschooled.
I was actually thinking of things more like multicultural math; while I don't think Ebonics should be accepted on an equal level with "standard English" (and note the quotes; I am very aware of the descriptive/proscriptive grammar issues), mostly because of the great harm it does to people so taught, it is a valid topic of study in some situations.
However, in the multicultural math case, the math is all but obliterated, and all that is left behind is a matrix of "multiculturalism" that most people would find quite offensive (even those supposedly being "protected"/pandered to) and is only tangentially related to reality of any kind. I don't know how they'd convert that into spelling off-hand, but then, I would never have guessed how thoroughly mathematics could be bastardized either, so I'm not the best judge.
But when you started insulting me for completely irrelevant reasons I realized that we are actually talking about how unhappy you are, which is not a very interesting topic.
No, it's "I before E, except whenever the hell it feels like it."
Any other rule has too many exceptions.
This is unlikely to appear in school anytime soon. (Assuming they continue to teach actualy spelling and don't switch to "multicultural spelling", where I suppose that rule would become literal truth because spelling things the way white men do would be racist....)
I can see in one years curriculum "we are going to war because of weapons of mass destruction". Next year the laptop says "we went to war to liberate a people from a ruthless dictator". If the first sentance was in the book, it could not be erased, and students would ask "what? why? how did it change?".
Read current textbooks much? You hardly need computers for such historical revisionism.
(Of course, while the 'right wing' efforts, mostly unsuccessful at that, of some people to get ID into textbooks and Evolution demoted to a theory on equal grounds, the highly successful and pervasive re-writing of history has been done by the multi-cultural 'left wing', and this doesn't bother the press enough for them to inform people. "Wings" quoted because in reality, the same mindset drives both sets of people; only whom and how much they offend changes, with the resulting changes in coverage. We really need to get rid of the mindset that school textbooks are the correct place to fight ideological wars. You can't make them ideology free, but surely there's something a little less extreme than the current situation. Look up "multicultural math" sometime... Oi! Whatever small core of value that idea may have had, and it is quite small, is destroyed by the effect it has on those it is taught to.)
Insurance, of course, isn't a magical wellspring of money; money in to the insurance must ultimately exceed the money out, or the insurer will quit.
I can't imagine the chance of a $850 laptop needing to be replaced in a year of use by an elementary school student is even as low as 16%, and that's rounding up and leaving no profit for the insurer. ($850 is taken from other posts, but ultimately any reasonable cost is going to come out with the same basic results.)
Expect that premium to rise, rise, rise. (I'd expect $300-$400 to be the necessary range, and I may still be being conservative.)
(By the way, that initial sentence is generic commentary on the mindset of many people, especially when it comes to medical insurance; I'm not accusing you of having that mindset or promoting it, activesynapsis. I recognize you're just reporting news.)
It's really not the buzzwords so much as the matrix of meaningless in which they are embedded.
For instance, I've seen the phrase "core competency" come up in this discussion a couple of times. I've actually adopted that one in all seriousness, though, because it is a valuable concept, especially in this time of outsourcing. (And remember, outsourcing doesn't just mean "to India"... a six-person company can't hardly afford not to outsource HR nowadays, and that is largely a good thing all the way around.) If you are in a company and you can't identify your core competencies, you're in trouble. If you try to outsource your core competencies, you might as well just pack up shop. And you ought to be wary about taking on things that don't play to your core competencies, and you ought to be careful about expanding them if you don't have the resources.
But I use the term very specifically, and because there is no better replacement. The problem isn't that word specifically, it's when it gets buried in passive voice and slapped together with other "buzzwords" and ultimately stripped of all referents. "Core competency" is meaningless if you don't really know what it is, or it has no effect on the rest of the sentence/paragraph it is embedded in (i.e., the paragraph makes sense equally if your "core competency" is spinning cotton into thread or performing top-secret assassination missions). Generally, a "mission statement" ought to say outright what it is supposed to be.
There are other similar buzzwords that if you dig into where they came from, there are valuable ideas there and there are a few others I use in all seriousness, even though I'm more an engineer than a manager. It's really more how they are used, abused, misunderstood, and (perhaps most importantly, as shown above) underspecified that really hurts.
(Here, I'm talking about the traditional "buzzwords". This is a separate class from "words I use to say something without invoking the negative connotations", like "issue" for "problem". Those are basically indefensible.)
Re: Losing your files if you encrypt them on a standalone computer: Ultimately, if you lose the password, the files should be gone forever if there is no other vector to recover them. Any method of recovering them represents a security hole.
Encryption is a statement that you want only "authorized people" to view the files, where you indicate authorization by possession of a password. If you forget how to tell the computer you're an authorized person, losing the files is a feature, not a bug. If that scenario is unacceptable, you need to secure your files with something other than encryption!
WTF is Microsoft supposed to do, exactly, in the single computer case that doesn't render the encryption merely a minor stumbling block for an attacker? (At which point I suggest you might be bitching about the pointlessness of it all instead... I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but I hate "damned if you do, damned if you don't" attitudes even more.)
Slashdot Mirror
Modding your XBox is not intrinsically illegal; you can take out the innards and put it into a new case and nobody can stop you.
When people talk about "modding the XBox" though, they're talking about specific modifications that, among other things, bypass the copyright controls contained in the XBox. This is a violation of the DMCA in the US, quite clear-cut.
While I believe that such controls being on the XBox in the first place is immoral, my personal opinion has little bearing on the legal status, which is quite clear.
So, "modding the XBox" isn't illegal, but "modding the XBox" is. Two different senses of that phrase. Don't let others snow you with the difference; I assure you it won't confuse a judge.
1. with xbox media center on your 2. modded xbox, install this script ooba and then 3. you get access to Comedy Central [and other things].
OK, but you do realize this is a completely irrelevant "counterargument", as TiVo's service will be 1. not require an installation well beyond the average person's capability, 2. run on legal, off-the-shelf hardware, and 3. access content legally?
I mean, come on, the fact that you can buy Roluxes in a back alley in Hong Kong hardly proves that Rolex's business model is fatally flawed!
I'll echo the "Python" recommendations, tempered by the fact that a Rails-like framework may be a good idea. On the other hand, it may involve learning too many things at once; I've been web developing for just shy of ten years now and it's hard for me to feel how hard this stuff is. But take Javascript, HTML, Ruby, the Rails framework, and a couple of things tossed in for good measure, and it may prove a bit much. (Or not. I happily defer to anyone who has actually tried to teach programming starting people from scratch from Rails. But I think I'd start with a tech that is made out of less acronym soup.)
But what I really wanted to comment on was:
We have been toying with the idea of having the introduction course be in PHP or Ruby on Rails; but are not convinced that they lead well into higher level languages.
Bwa? Check your terminology. Ruby, Python, Perl, and the like are the highest level languages there are for general use at the moment. They can hardly fail to lead well into themselves.
(PHP is deliberately not in that list. I would not start them there. PHP requires immense discipline to use properly and there's little gain to be had for that discipline. I'd say it's the closest candidate for a modern heir to the "You can't teach a Basic programmer how to program" meme from Dykstra; in some sense it's not a "bad language" but it definately teaches a lot of very bad habits, with a community that enables this behavior. Your students should not end up on Bugtraq with their school project.)
In fact, you'll be jumping those kids ahead of a lot of Old Farts (TM) who still look down on those languages for a host of misguided reasons and insist on using C, not because it's the best choice for some good reason (like a cross-platform library, for which it is still King), but because they honestly think it's the best choice.
Your danger is that if the kids are ever presented with C, they'll wonder why the hell anyone does things in such a baroque fashion and they'll refuse to be placed into that sort of bondage. Me, I consider that progress, but YMMV.
I had a Korg X5, the same innards as the venerable (and I believe considered "classic") 05/W series in the mid-90s.
Only in modern times am I hearing music from consoles/computers that was as good as what I heard from that machine, and most of the time the modern music isn't dynamically generated.
Tie Fighter and the opening to Day of the Tentacle stand out as excellent game music. The former has wonderful orchestral arrangements, and the latter has this solo clarinet that almost sounded like someone was actually playing one. (My clarinet patch was good, but that arrangement made it even better.)
Music has, for all the press, been pretty neglected by modern times. We have the tech for some great dynamic music, but we just get MP3s instead; certainly nicer than FM synth, but lacking for many games.
This thing is targetted at the Open Source community like the TiVo is targetted at the open source community.
(This being Slashdot, where anything more subtle than a marching band tends to be missed by a disturbing number of people, I'll spell that out: "Not at all.")
... you were writing fiction... right...?
This is just another varient on Medical Student Syndrome.
In psychology it's so bad, due to the nature of people and the subject, that every Abnormal Psychology book I've seen, and the class I took, starts with a warning abouth the syndrome; most psychological disorders are defined in rather normal terms, and at any moment, most of us have at least one symptom that shows up in the DSM. It's the confluence of multiple symptoms (usually) that persist and cause problems for the person that defines a true problem, but if you're not paying attention to those caveats (or they don't reassure you)...
Medical Student Syndrome isn't going to kill you, but it can cause some stress at a time in your life when you really don't need it. (No joke.)
We understand it OK and a lot of our humor revolves around it.
We just don't agree on the terminology. Whether or not that's "right" or "wrong" depends on how prescriptive or proscriptive you're feeling today.
If you can't afford the equipment to build a distiller, a pre-steam era technology that is largely a few carefully selected pipes and two pots, you're probably doomed anyhow.
If you can't afford the energy to run that distiller, you are doomed if you're trying space-flight at the same time.
Plots based on how moronic the main characters (proxying for the writers own moronicity) are are annoying, sci-fi or otherwise.
Is it compelling? Does it offer anything significant over what I've already got? The Dreamcast gave me a big "No" on that score.
Wow. What exactly were you looking for? The Dreamcast had one of the best starting line ups in American history, and to call it a step up over the Playstation One is selling it extremely short. (PS1 -> DC was a much bigger step than DC -> PS2; I'd say about 3:1, though that's an inherently subjective number.)
Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, Sega NFL 2K, and to a lesser degree House Of The Dead (although there was a lot of hype at the time) and Powerstone were all strong release games, and most of the rest were at least passable. The first one in particular still holds up pretty well, I think, and I still play it.
(Now, if your thing is RPGs, that statement does make sense. Skies of Arcadia and Grandia 2 are both quite strong, but that's nearly the end of the list and neither are release games.)
There aren't many consoles with a better release line up, not counting reverse compatibility. (In which case the PS/2 and various GameBoy incarnations clean up, but that's not really the spirit here.)
Wow, I wasn't thinking of buying LongHorn. I mean, all those features they tore out was really kind of a bummer.
But dayamn, I have to have that feature!
Nice to see Microsoft finally give me a positive reason to buy LongHorn. Now I can't wait for LongHorn!
Can Microsoft innovate or what?
I know what you're talking about.
But... consider that the reason that occurs is the pressures caused by the distribution mechanism, which strongly favor$ mainstream distribution over niche.
This starts out from day one depending on BitTorrent, which strongly (though not quite) entirely flattens the costs to the creator for mainstream vs. niche.
There is reason to hope this will never suffer that fate, as long as the same people stay in charge, because it can afford to stay niche. Then again, if they get too experimental and successful with the advertising, it could replicate the G4 slide.
Only one way to find out. Worth keeping an eye on. A lot of people have been saying this is the path... soon we'll have hard data.
Looking at your other reply, I can already guess you're going to say that's not the same as teaching in a public school. True, but it's still proof that teaching is hardly this mystical black art that only those trained in its mysteries are qualified to speak to and nobody else possibly stands a chance in the face of its mighty challenge. Maybe teaching is that hard for you, but it isn't for the rest of us, and you don't get to lock us out of this discussion that easily, by Appeal to (your own self-proclaimed, no less!) Authority, which a mighty educator such as yourself may recognize as one of the logical fallacies.
I might be able to make that deal. It doesn't seem to be in the cards, though, and I'd want specifics, but that's just life.
AFAIK homeschooling is only a local phenomenon?
Well, it is sort of the default state of affairs. Try looking for proof that institutional schooling is better... and I mean proof, in the scientific sense. I've come up pretty short. We seemed to have just sort of skipped that step, and now that we're in our, what, fourth, fifth generation of institutional schooling, it's simply religiously unquestioned, complete with persecution of heretics.
Personally, "institutional, one-size fits all schooling is a Good Idea" is on my short list of things that our grandchildren will look back on and say how did they believe that? By the nature of the list, I can't be sure of it, or any of the other entries, since I live in the Now myself and I don't share their perspective, but history shows the list isn't empty and I'd lay money I'm not wrong on all counts... (It's got about four or five things on it.)
Well, now you're demonstrating an inability to read, since I never did claim they were the same, and now you're not impressing me for other reasons. I merely said we're qualified to have opinions, not that this is the exact same as being experienced.
I'm not sure you're qualified to hold opinions at all.
Besides, you picked a bad guy to say that to. I taught in college, with all the formal training that implies, and frankly, my first day seemed to go pretty well. In fact, most professors have no "training" to speak of, and quite a lot of them do quite well. (And quite a lot with the training do quite poorly, so... it would take more science to unravel this question fully.)
Depends on what you mean by real educator.
If you mean a real teacher, with experience "in the field", I'm listening, but I'd point out that we've all been on the receiving end of education so we're all qualified to at least have opinions based on our own experience and you aren't entitled to a monopoly on the subject.
If you mean an "education expert", who might be teaching teaching in college, I'll stop talking out my ass when they do, and move beyond considering "science" a four-letter word. (There actually is some good work in the field, but I see no evidence that it is making its way out into practice in any significant way, against the stiff competition of politically-driven fads.)
Not to jump on the dogpile here, but...
don't homeschool (no parent can possibly become an expert on a multitude of topics
You think teachers are experts?
Forget what you know, forget what I might say because maybe I'm a biased source. Think of your local "teaching college", go to their web page, and look up their curriculum.
In order to teach high school math, a teacher must learn... high school math. (At my local school, they do get axiomatic geometry as their last course, but by then the damage of thinking they know math is long done and I'd lay money the vast majority of them just slide through.)
In order to teach high school physics, a teacher must learn... high school physics.
In order to teach high school English, a teacher must learn... high school English.
Teachers are not experts; they spend a lot of time learning "how to teach" from people who wouldn't know science if it bit them in the ass, and little more than the bare minimum learning the subjects they are supposed to teach. To be "experts", I'd expect they'd need to progress at least 20-30 college credits beyond anything they would need to teach high school, and that is way more than required. Therefore, most don't do it.
Of course, nobody stops the teachers from getting more into the subject, but nobody will encourage it, nobody will give them any/much additional credit for it, and it won't help them much anyhow.
If you actually retained the information you got from high school (which, incidentally, is my vote for the thing to change in schools... stop teaching children they can just slack off because 4th grade is pretty much the same as 3rd grade...), you're perfectly qualified to be a teacher. In fact, you may well be educated more than many teachers since there is no guarantee that they are that qualified; they may have slid through school too. (Indeed, in my experience, there's no guarantee they're qualified to teach the subject they are supposed to be teaching....)
It has been my experience that people who dismiss home schooling on Slashdot seem to do so with highly, highly unrealistic views of teachers that are, frankly, empirically wrong. This is part of why to date none of them have changed my mind on the topic, I suppose. In the unlikely event I have children, they are so homeschooled.
I was actually thinking of things more like multicultural math; while I don't think Ebonics should be accepted on an equal level with "standard English" (and note the quotes; I am very aware of the descriptive/proscriptive grammar issues), mostly because of the great harm it does to people so taught, it is a valid topic of study in some situations.
However, in the multicultural math case, the math is all but obliterated, and all that is left behind is a matrix of "multiculturalism" that most people would find quite offensive (even those supposedly being "protected"/pandered to) and is only tangentially related to reality of any kind. I don't know how they'd convert that into spelling off-hand, but then, I would never have guessed how thoroughly mathematics could be bastardized either, so I'm not the best judge.
But when you started insulting me for completely irrelevant reasons I realized that we are actually talking about how unhappy you are, which is not a very interesting topic.
*salute* I may have to steal that someday.
No, it's "I before E, except whenever the hell it feels like it."
Any other rule has too many exceptions.
This is unlikely to appear in school anytime soon. (Assuming they continue to teach actualy spelling and don't switch to "multicultural spelling", where I suppose that rule would become literal truth because spelling things the way white men do would be racist....)
I can see in one years curriculum "we are going to war because of weapons of mass destruction". Next year the laptop says "we went to war to liberate a people from a ruthless dictator". If the first sentance was in the book, it could not be erased, and students would ask "what? why? how did it change?".
Read current textbooks much? You hardly need computers for such historical revisionism.
(Of course, while the 'right wing' efforts, mostly unsuccessful at that, of some people to get ID into textbooks and Evolution demoted to a theory on equal grounds, the highly successful and pervasive re-writing of history has been done by the multi-cultural 'left wing', and this doesn't bother the press enough for them to inform people. "Wings" quoted because in reality, the same mindset drives both sets of people; only whom and how much they offend changes, with the resulting changes in coverage. We really need to get rid of the mindset that school textbooks are the correct place to fight ideological wars. You can't make them ideology free, but surely there's something a little less extreme than the current situation. Look up "multicultural math" sometime... Oi! Whatever small core of value that idea may have had, and it is quite small, is destroyed by the effect it has on those it is taught to.)
Insurance, of course, isn't a magical wellspring of money; money in to the insurance must ultimately exceed the money out, or the insurer will quit.
I can't imagine the chance of a $850 laptop needing to be replaced in a year of use by an elementary school student is even as low as 16%, and that's rounding up and leaving no profit for the insurer. ($850 is taken from other posts, but ultimately any reasonable cost is going to come out with the same basic results.)
Expect that premium to rise, rise, rise. (I'd expect $300-$400 to be the necessary range, and I may still be being conservative.)
(By the way, that initial sentence is generic commentary on the mindset of many people, especially when it comes to medical insurance; I'm not accusing you of having that mindset or promoting it, activesynapsis. I recognize you're just reporting news.)
It's really not the buzzwords so much as the matrix of meaningless in which they are embedded.
For instance, I've seen the phrase "core competency" come up in this discussion a couple of times. I've actually adopted that one in all seriousness, though, because it is a valuable concept, especially in this time of outsourcing. (And remember, outsourcing doesn't just mean "to India"... a six-person company can't hardly afford not to outsource HR nowadays, and that is largely a good thing all the way around.) If you are in a company and you can't identify your core competencies, you're in trouble. If you try to outsource your core competencies, you might as well just pack up shop. And you ought to be wary about taking on things that don't play to your core competencies, and you ought to be careful about expanding them if you don't have the resources.
But I use the term very specifically, and because there is no better replacement. The problem isn't that word specifically, it's when it gets buried in passive voice and slapped together with other "buzzwords" and ultimately stripped of all referents. "Core competency" is meaningless if you don't really know what it is, or it has no effect on the rest of the sentence/paragraph it is embedded in (i.e., the paragraph makes sense equally if your "core competency" is spinning cotton into thread or performing top-secret assassination missions). Generally, a "mission statement" ought to say outright what it is supposed to be.
There are other similar buzzwords that if you dig into where they came from, there are valuable ideas there and there are a few others I use in all seriousness, even though I'm more an engineer than a manager. It's really more how they are used, abused, misunderstood, and (perhaps most importantly, as shown above) underspecified that really hurts.
(Here, I'm talking about the traditional "buzzwords". This is a separate class from "words I use to say something without invoking the negative connotations", like "issue" for "problem". Those are basically indefensible.)
Re: Losing your files if you encrypt them on a standalone computer: Ultimately, if you lose the password, the files should be gone forever if there is no other vector to recover them. Any method of recovering them represents a security hole.
Encryption is a statement that you want only "authorized people" to view the files, where you indicate authorization by possession of a password. If you forget how to tell the computer you're an authorized person, losing the files is a feature, not a bug. If that scenario is unacceptable, you need to secure your files with something other than encryption!
WTF is Microsoft supposed to do, exactly, in the single computer case that doesn't render the encryption merely a minor stumbling block for an attacker? (At which point I suggest you might be bitching about the pointlessness of it all instead... I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but I hate "damned if you do, damned if you don't" attitudes even more.)
Yes.
Next question, please.