It's analogous but not the same. You experience less then 1 g while going down in an elevator, but never 0 g. That'd require your elevator to be basically falling and you'd be floating around in it. Big difference. Some roller coasters do give you 0 g and even negative g for a few instants at a time, still though, that's not going to be -anything- like free floating in a pressurized cabin without any wind blowing in your face. They are offering a totally unique experience.
Generally I think motion sickness is a result of the disconnectedness of your inner ear to the rest of your perceptions. Inner ear feels one thing, your eyes see another and your brain/stomach go "Oh crap, I think we've just been poisoned, lets try to get rid of it before its too late BLARF" Thats why some kids get motion sickness up until they can see out of the car. Being too short to look out the window, they just experience all this movement with no visual reference and have a hard time dealing with it.
When you are sky diving, everything is still relatively consistent, ground is coming at you, you feel all that wind in your face, it all adds up. When you are in a contained unit just suddenly floating, its probably very disconcerting to that primal instinct.
With the obvious exceptions of the mountains and the lake, this map really reminds me of my hometown, Rockford, Il. Then again, the Simpsons' Springfield always heavily reminds me of Rockford ( which actually has been named worst city in america by Money magazine ).
The place is probably even more dysfunctionally disturbing then the Simpsons could ever dare go with Springfield because it basically has a fat line of racial segregation running right down the river. The city continues to grow ever more sprawlingly away from it's past to the east while the west side festers in the decay of the great factory move out of the 70s. A lot of the old factories still stand, all their windows broken out, the whole thing just completely rusted over.
The schools managed to actually lose segregation lawsuit a few years ago because of the way their magnet system bused in white kids from the east side to the nice big old schools on the westside, while displacing the local kids into small weirdo cubicle type developments annexed onto said schools. Unfortunately, this just resulted in a bunch of lawyers making millions and now the schools are more underfunded and worse off then ever. I was a weird case because I was a kid on the westside that got bused to a westside magnet school, but I still saw all the black kids in their annex version of a school. We had seperate lunch times, seperate come and go times, we virtually -never- saw them even though we technically went to school with them every day. Very creepy. Each one of our classes would have exactly 2 black kids, one boy, one girl.
I grew up on the border of the west/east sides in a pretty poor neighborhood. Everybody was relatively friendly while I lived there, but I basically experienced a minor version of white flight when I was 12 and we got out of there as the bad neighborhoods started to grow in size. I happened to be visiting a friends a few years ago 6 or so blocks from where I grew up and at night there was a fully automatic fire gunfight, or just somebody shooting into the sky, who knows. All the people clear the streets, go inside and basically batten down the hatches. The guy I was staying with actually had these full window size reinforced sliding solid shutters he could cover his windows with and basically turn his house into a tank.
The place has a lot of physical charm still, as there are still a lot of really nice old victorian homes and the monikor "The Forest City" still applies.. The upper-middle class love it there because it has all the small town feel in areas with all the big city convienence of 3 or so walmarts and every other major chain you can possibly imagine.
One last random similarity I can remember off the top of my head. Remember the episode where Lisa accidently goes to the wrong school but the architecture is exactly the same and she actually finds her class with different kids? Virtually the exact same thing happened to me, there was a carbon copy version of my elementary school on the other side of town and one time at night when we were going to some kind of function there I thought we were in my school and I tried to find my desk but ended up getting totally confused.
You're going to need to be more specific about what you mean by false security.
We have a large military that protects us from foreign invasion. We have a large police force which protects us domestically for the most part. We have social services that support poor people, which directly gives them security, which indirectly gives nonpoor people security since they are less likely to resort to crime to get by. Free education gives people who wouldn't be able to afford private schooling a much better chance of succeeding, which has many benefits, including helping to control communicable disease, and reducing crime.
There is an undeniable amount of real security and benefit the big government gives us. I think you need to be specific in referring to the sorts of false forms of security that are more imposing then useful, like being able to tap all our phone calls, collect data on all our transactions, surveil us constantly, sieze our assets with little reason, etc.
A platform built on the foundatain of "We're not really getting any security from our government, you are deceived to think so" to me just seems to be totally not paying attention to reality. The only way I can imagine somebody actually buying such a line is if they've never actually been exposed to any real insecurity, most likely because their government has pampered them so successfully.
Well, the only reason I sort of felt it was a copout answer is that it's a bit simplistic, not neccesarily wrong. To me my main issue with libertarianism is that when I try to get into the platform, it's this huge to-do list of very grandoise and sometimes vague things, the actual implementation of which is sometimes based on a kind of cascading circular dependency on other grandoise things where realistically probably none of it would ever happen since each task would deadlock with another task that it relies on to be possible. I'm talking entirely of their economic and domestic policies, not the civil liberty stuff.
The easiest example I can think of is government deregulation of various utilities. We've seen that in our current environment this can be a very bad thing, so in the libertarian mindset, you'd go, oh crap, there was some other form of change we needed first, and it must be something to do with the government being too big and powerful, umm, the government was protecting that monopoly, so we have to start rolling back all subsidies first, but to do that fairly we have to look at all subsidies so, lets see, why do these businesses need subsidies and what advantages do we have from them, ahh, favorable trade aggreements with some countries and tariffs on others have made this a good commodity to subsidize, ok, get rid of those trade aggreements, free trade is needed there, oh crap that just flooded our markets with cheap goods, why, oh because of our minimum wage laws and closed borders we can't compete with 3rd world manufacturering, ok, lets open up the borders, but thats expensive to support social services wise so we'll destroy social services like we wanted to, and ok, now what...
I know thats a potentially pretty flawed association of events there, but it's a kind of rough example of how I perceive strict libertarian thinking, anytime they run up against a problem with one of their platform elements being implemented in the real world, it had problems because some other platform element wasn't followed because some other.... etc etc..
I guess you have the freedom of advocating a pretty extremist platform when you have no real chance of being elected. I figure such grandoise plans are there to just grab attention. A really moderate realistic plan probably would be too 'ho hum' to get any air time, which is probably the #1 problem I have with politcs in general. Nobody cares to hear a drawn out, complex, and realistic plan...
Although it would really be interesting to hear each one of those really extreme ideas explained in detail, like, what do you expect to happen to the citizens of Iraq when you suddenly pull out? Don't you think that the rebels will take over and create an even worse, more oppressive and totally choatic 'government' then they had in the first place?
Gaining any votes as a 3rd party seems likely in and of itself to persuade the other 2 parties towards your platform. Any swing state where the 2 parties might be fighting in a 1 or 2 percentage race, if the 3rd party manages to represent even 1%, why not try to appeal to them in your campaigning?
On the other hand, sure they won't win an presidential election for eons to come, but as they slowly creep into the national awareness by having a semi-interesting and noticable presidential election showout it helps the party in virtually every other political campaign that you speak of.
I wonder if the idea of a corporation as being it's own citizen is nonlibertarian, in which case they could just say that the individuals involved in the scandal could all be individually sued by the people they wrongfully ripped off.
That would be a kind of cop out answer though, what would be a lot more interesting for example would be the steps required to eliminate the nonliability of corporate executives.
I'm not a libertarian so I'm just making this all up, but I just figured that the idea of personal responsibility was a big libertarian thing so therefore the idea of corporations limiting the fruad liability of it's employees seems nonlibertarian to me. I wonder what kind of massive downside there would be to limiting corporate liability and replacing it with personal.. some crane operator accidently kills a coworker and in most cases he is held directly responsible in a civil trial and the company gets off without paying a thing?
Well, for what it's worth, the other people who benefited from it didn't until a few years after and any that did had to continue their education on their own. It was a good opener, and what was more important then anything technical we had learned was the experience of creating something, working productively with other people in a predominately cooperative as opposed to competitive environment that we were all used to school fostering.
That doesn't conclude there isn't a crushing authority though, it just suggests that one isn't neccesary for kids to lose interest in learning.
Just my personal opinion, but I consider that oppressive environment to be partially responsible for the situation where kids never feel the _need_ to learn something. In school, they tend to actually _do_ so little. The kids that seem to learn mass amounts quickly and intuitively tend to be the ones that managed to pick up some kind of complex hobby somewhere, the reasons for which are probably extremely varied but could probably mostly be due to parental guidance and support to make the hobby possible. For what it's worth though, I think education tries to kill hobbies as well though by loading kids up with increasing amounts of busy work in their off-school time.
Personally, I just skidded through school with C's and D's because I virtually never did my homework, and spent all that time instead tinkering with computers. Fundamentally it paid off, even the few times I tried to reform myself and apply myself more fully towards school, I wasn't learning more then I was on my own in my freetime. I generally paid attention while in school and learned quite a bit although it often felt like a massive waste of time, especially High School, I just didn't really care about my marks after some point and in a wierd twist of unconventional parental guidance, my parents sort of stopped caring about my grades too and began to trust in what I was doing.
No matter what, I wasn't ever going to nearly as good an academic as I was going to be a highly skilled journeyman style jack of all trades computer guy. I was lucky in a weird way that my teachers sort of stopped trying to push me.. My ideal situation would have been to replace relatively mundane classes with basically vocational work periods to accomplish goals.. Luckily enough through a pretty complex set of events involving just how poor $$$ wise my school was, my senior year I got exactly that. 4 out of 6 periods were involved with building/administrating multiple computer labs from scratch on donated busted computers. Getting a technology education experience that was probably in the top 0.1% in the state while going to school that was probably in the lower 10% for funding was a pretty sweet irony.
If that was too round about to hook up to my first point, basically, up until that point, I had a pretty miserable education experience. I basically felt imprisoned, I was just going to coast along and serve time until the government said I could be free. But as soon as I got the freedom and opportunity to do something on my own, my life flipped a 180 and I made up for a lot of wasted time in one year. The opportunity was so profound that I literally felt that all the served time was worth it, just to get so lucky.
"Some students are going to misbehave, cause trouble, underperform, or fail, and we should let them. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up, and you don't get increasing results by applying declining standards."
This is a great statement. I have a slightly different perspective on it though. While my line of thinking, which is really just a sort of wishful thought, only seems to lead to declining standards, I think that the conventional measures for determining 'success' or 'failure' in education are pretty flawed to begin with.
I went through 12 years of public education dealing with a constant expectation from parents and faculty that I should be getting straight A's instead of more or less a straight line of C's and D's. This expectation came from my general demeanor, and several years of intelligence testing and counselling. None of it would change the fact that I had no work ethic when it came to school assignments. I simply wouldn't, nearly couldn't, perform their repetitive chore version of learning.
I was naturally curious, asked a ton of questions, generally would pay attention in class and I learned a lot that way, I was lucky that many teachers just gave me a benefit of the doubt in terms of their actual opinion of my intelligence, but that was often a source of frustration for both them and me as it almost never helped my letter grade. In this sense, I was in some small way benefited by a sort of declining standard. It wasn't full on decline because I still received low marks, but at least very few faculty actually seemed to look down on me, in the way that my parents describe how their teachers treated kids with low marks. As I got older, teachers generally gave me less and less of the benefit of the doubt and I progressively withdrew from caring about my education.
It wasn't until my senior year in High School that I realized that my way had been nearly the best for me overall and I regained most of the confidence in my own intelligence that I had slowly lost through years of mediocre marks. Naturally what I had been doing with all that time I should've been doing homework was spent working on computers.
What happened my senior year that was particularly lucky was a great irony, because my school was so fiscally poor, I was able to convince a couple key faculty that we should build a computer lab using a few underdeployed computers they had received on random donation, and that I knew how to do most of the work. For some reason, even with my poor reputation as a student, I was able to impress them with the proposal. With the sponsorship of one particularly progressive teacher I was able to waive nearly half of my classes since I'd already satisfied most of the curricular graduation requirements. We started out fairly small, but donations of mostly broken old computers started pouring in and we basically floored big chunks of the school district with how much we were able to do with so little by basically leveraging my skills for free. To them the scale of our technology project was unfathomable in such a cash deprived district.
What really brought my confidence back though was when old teachers in whose classes I earned D's and F's inevitably swung by to check out what the big deal was and they saw what it was I was actually good at. The reactions were varied, a couple were actually hostilely dismisive to some extent, seemingly jealous that something could actually be created in such a forsaken environment, but particularly satisfying to me were a few teachers that actually apologized to me, a few years after I even had them as a teacher. They were just apologizing for their impression of my overall ability and were worried that I may have felt that they just wrote me off. At that point I was basically working with quite a bit of the faculty as more of a peer then a student as we expanded the network and tried to introduce extra PCs into various classes and train them on the software.
Perhaps they are aliens capable of time travel that received a satellite transmission from us of the particulars of the activity of our telescope millions of years from now. Then they went back in time millions of years before now and programmed their transmitter so that it would perfectly sync up with our attempts to observe.
I think you entirely miss the point that part of what makes it an interesting story is that fact. His 'by the way' statement is merely pointing it out, and the way he phrased "looked like your stereotypical 'hacker'", with 'hacker' in quotes suggests that he is aware of a potentially prejudiced stereotype and it's use for potential profiling, and that in this case that profiling was not applied because a priest was targetted, basically it was pointing out a bit irony.
You take his 'by the way' matter of fact statement all the way to point of thinking he is advocating prejudice. I think you are prejudiced by having such a knee jerk reaction on such little information. Even the assumption that he is advocating anything in the first place has no real foundation.
Coding an opensource game is generally done by it's developers for their own fun. This notion that they are somehow naturally trying to compete with commericial games is kind of like saying that a local informal softball team is getting whooped by a major league team. They aren't even playing against each other.
Selfishly I hope Naruto is never licensed over here, losing the fansub and distribution support would really suck.
But much more troublesome, I just can't picture where this show fits in in an American timeslot. If you leave it unedited, it's too bloody and racy for a normal kid's show, but it won't make enough money in a late time slot and it's main appeal $$$ wise is probably the wide array of markettable characters for toys, etc. So basically it just seems like any license will edit out tons of good stuff.
They should just leave it the way it is now, but try to bring over all the merchandise (assuming there is some) and see what happens.
"As Steven Spielberg told The Associated Press recently, PG-13 puts "hot sauce" on a movie in the viewer's mind."
Blah, more like mixing hot sauce with milk. Aiming just below the R for the more profitable PG-13 has ruined many movies in my mind. Giving up grit and realism for something more palatable to censors while thrashing the original vision.
As I understand it, Everquest has a considerably more expensive server you can play on, like $60 a month or something? Does anybody know if that is actually effective in making it a better play environment through the idea that your common harassing player won't dish out that much? I'm sure a common reaction would be that only tools would pay that much and thus it could be even worse, but if you really are an avid player playing 3-6 hours a night, it would seem that an extra $50 a month would be worth if it made those 90-180 hours significantly better. I wonder if this real world parallel of trying to price out people who can't or just don't care enough to pay more will catch on in terms of online communities.
Then it's really just an issue where there is no usable classification for the degree. The basic problem is that no jobs are looking for degrees in "Applied Computing" They have virtually no choice but to call it computer science because of the relationship between jobs and diplomas.
That's kind of what I was saying when I said that the best people I've encountered all have personal interest in computing that keeps them current. Absolutely no degree is going to carry you forever in the field alone. I just have a feeling that a computer science program with an strong emphasis on projects and building experience through them is going to be more immensely more useful then one with an emphasis on sitting in classes, listening to lectures and taking written tests.
So, what if you've had a lifelong interest in computing, and a distaste for formal education. You dropped out of college during the boom, got a pretty good job and several years of rapidly advancing experience. All your friends who stayed in college wish they'd dropped out too because now they've graduated into a lousy job market and are having a hell of a time getting any decent experience under their respective belts.
But you are beginning to wish you had that piece of paper, you think you can probably keep doing pretty good without it, but you wonder where the cieling is without it.
A program like the one this article about is appealing because of how quickly you can get it out of the way, but it just doesn't seem appropriate because it being so specific technology based, you probably already know a significant majority of it.
What you most ideally want educationally isn't the fundamentals of all of computer science, but access to a body of applied experience on dealing with large complex projects. Design is your biggest weakness because you've been flying by the seat of your pants, your experience is filling in the gaps naturally, but you really wish there was somebody to mentor with that had at least some of the answers, right now most people look to you for solutions and as you look behind at what you've created, you see so much room for refactoring its kind of painful.
Is there an ideal solution? Taking the quick program to just get the piece of paper seems like it could be the most insanely easy thing to do. But can you get the piece of paper in a quick way and get an educational experience that is actually useful? What about simply expanding your horizons in a totally new direction? What kind of rapid degree programs are there in other fields?
But you have to admit that it's probably going to be a more applicable education for the jobs that most computer science grads go into. It's difficult for me to not have a fairly biased opinion here just because of my personal experience in the workplace. So far, all the best programmers/DBAs/admins I've dealt with don't come from CS backgrounds, but from just about everything else imaginable and they all tend to have developed their applicable computing skills largely on their own.
It's almost like the conclusion of formal CS training had a tendency to shut down the desire or ability to keep learning, but those who's knowledge of technology was never formally shaped never had that kind of closure. There's this idea that CS education sets a foundation in theory that will take you through all technologies, but it really seems like we are still in a phase where things are too immature and developing too quickly to assume that foundation won't need to be dug up several times.
It's fair to say that I have not had much exposure to the higher echelons of people coming out of truly great CS programs, I'm not disputing the existence of the best of the best, I'm making a generalization about my impression of computer science education on average. I feel that it tends to be largely inapplicable. Methodology and technology just keep changing for better or worse, the true key to your ability to stay applicable is to simply have personal interest as far as I can tell.
By far the best part of a computer education is engaging in large projects. Any program that puts an emphasis on projects I think is starting off on the right path. I'd go so far as to say that even on day 1 some form of significantly complex project should be established as a longer term goal, probably a yet-to-be-decided selection amongst projects to get people imagining how what they are learning could potentially be applied as they learn it. Even if that approach leads to some early golden hammerism where every single thing they learn is attempted to be applied to the wrong problems, that experience would be invaluable.
Fundamentally after a certain point, typing speed is only totally benefiting people who are performing data entry or perform many informal communications with many people simultaneously. There have been a few times while IMing with coworkers, that typing my response too fast can actually distract them and make them nervous to some extent.
Of course the even more annoying habit is crafting a response to what you expect them to say before they even say it, and just hitting enter if they do.. or just putting it in the clipboard if they don't. (shift-home ctrl-x)
To me the big difference in speed between two computer users peforming the same task they already know how to do is their knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, not their ability to type words fast. They seem to be notoriously difficult to get people to want to learn.
Slashdot Mirror
It's analogous but not the same. You experience less then 1 g while going down in an elevator, but never 0 g. That'd require your elevator to be basically falling and you'd be floating around in it. Big difference. Some roller coasters do give you 0 g and even negative g for a few instants at a time, still though, that's not going to be -anything- like free floating in a pressurized cabin without any wind blowing in your face. They are offering a totally unique experience.
Generally I think motion sickness is a result of the disconnectedness of your inner ear to the rest of your perceptions. Inner ear feels one thing, your eyes see another and your brain/stomach go "Oh crap, I think we've just been poisoned, lets try to get rid of it before its too late BLARF" Thats why some kids get motion sickness up until they can see out of the car. Being too short to look out the window, they just experience all this movement with no visual reference and have a hard time dealing with it.
When you are sky diving, everything is still relatively consistent, ground is coming at you, you feel all that wind in your face, it all adds up. When you are in a contained unit just suddenly floating, its probably very disconcerting to that primal instinct.
With the obvious exceptions of the mountains and the lake, this map really reminds me of my hometown, Rockford, Il. Then again, the Simpsons' Springfield always heavily reminds me of Rockford ( which actually has been named worst city in america by Money magazine ).
The place is probably even more dysfunctionally disturbing then the Simpsons could ever dare go with Springfield because it basically has a fat line of racial segregation running right down the river. The city continues to grow ever more sprawlingly away from it's past to the east while the west side festers in the decay of the great factory move out of the 70s. A lot of the old factories still stand, all their windows broken out, the whole thing just completely rusted over.
The schools managed to actually lose segregation lawsuit a few years ago because of the way their magnet system bused in white kids from the east side to the nice big old schools on the westside, while displacing the local kids into small weirdo cubicle type developments annexed onto said schools. Unfortunately, this just resulted in a bunch of lawyers making millions and now the schools are more underfunded and worse off then ever. I was a weird case because I was a kid on the westside that got bused to a westside magnet school, but I still saw all the black kids in their annex version of a school. We had seperate lunch times, seperate come and go times, we virtually -never- saw them even though we technically went to school with them every day. Very creepy. Each one of our classes would have exactly 2 black kids, one boy, one girl.
I grew up on the border of the west/east sides in a pretty poor neighborhood. Everybody was relatively friendly while I lived there, but I basically experienced a minor version of white flight when I was 12 and we got out of there as the bad neighborhoods started to grow in size. I happened to be visiting a friends a few years ago 6 or so blocks from where I grew up and at night there was a fully automatic fire gunfight, or just somebody shooting into the sky, who knows. All the people clear the streets, go inside and basically batten down the hatches. The guy I was staying with actually had these full window size reinforced sliding solid shutters he could cover his windows with and basically turn his house into a tank.
The place has a lot of physical charm still, as there are still a lot of really nice old victorian homes and the monikor "The Forest City" still applies.. The upper-middle class love it there because it has all the small town feel in areas with all the big city convienence of 3 or so walmarts and every other major chain you can possibly imagine.
One last random similarity I can remember off the top of my head. Remember the episode where Lisa accidently goes to the wrong school but the architecture is exactly the same and she actually finds her class with different kids? Virtually the exact same thing happened to me, there was a carbon copy version of my elementary school on the other side of town and one time at night when we were going to some kind of function there I thought we were in my school and I tried to find my desk but ended up getting totally confused.
I really should have said software that is primarily -used- to make pirate DVDs.
You're going to need to be more specific about what you mean by false security.
We have a large military that protects us from foreign invasion.
We have a large police force which protects us domestically for the most part.
We have social services that support poor people, which directly gives them security, which indirectly gives nonpoor people security since they are less likely to resort to crime to get by.
Free education gives people who wouldn't be able to afford private schooling a much better chance of succeeding, which has many benefits, including helping to control communicable disease, and reducing crime.
There is an undeniable amount of real security and benefit the big government gives us. I think you need to be specific in referring to the sorts of false forms of security that are more imposing then useful, like being able to tap all our phone calls, collect data on all our transactions, surveil us constantly, sieze our assets with little reason, etc.
A platform built on the foundatain of "We're not really getting any security from our government, you are deceived to think so" to me just seems to be totally not paying attention to reality. The only way I can imagine somebody actually buying such a line is if they've never actually been exposed to any real insecurity, most likely because their government has pampered them so successfully.
Except in this case when you have software more or less designed to help make pirate DVDs, then pirates definitely -are- your customer base.
Well, the only reason I sort of felt it was a copout answer is that it's a bit simplistic, not neccesarily wrong. To me my main issue with libertarianism is that when I try to get into the platform, it's this huge to-do list of very grandoise and sometimes vague things, the actual implementation of which is sometimes based on a kind of cascading circular dependency on other grandoise things where realistically probably none of it would ever happen since each task would deadlock with another task that it relies on to be possible. I'm talking entirely of their economic and domestic policies, not the civil liberty stuff.
The easiest example I can think of is government deregulation of various utilities. We've seen that in our current environment this can be a very bad thing, so in the libertarian mindset, you'd go, oh crap, there was some other form of change we needed first, and it must be something to do with the government being too big and powerful, umm, the government was protecting that monopoly, so we have to start rolling back all subsidies first, but to do that fairly we have to look at all subsidies so, lets see, why do these businesses need subsidies and what advantages do we have from them, ahh, favorable trade aggreements with some countries and tariffs on others have made this a good commodity to subsidize, ok, get rid of those trade aggreements, free trade is needed there, oh crap that just flooded our markets with cheap goods, why, oh because of our minimum wage laws and closed borders we can't compete with 3rd world manufacturering, ok, lets open up the borders, but thats expensive to support social services wise so we'll destroy social services like we wanted to, and ok, now what...
I know thats a potentially pretty flawed association of events there, but it's a kind of rough example of how I perceive strict libertarian thinking, anytime they run up against a problem with one of their platform elements being implemented in the real world, it had problems because some other platform element wasn't followed because some other.... etc etc..
I guess you have the freedom of advocating a pretty extremist platform when you have no real chance of being elected. I figure such grandoise plans are there to just grab attention. A really moderate realistic plan probably would be too 'ho hum' to get any air time, which is probably the #1 problem I have with politcs in general. Nobody cares to hear a drawn out, complex, and realistic plan...
Although it would really be interesting to hear each one of those really extreme ideas explained in detail, like, what do you expect to happen to the citizens of Iraq when you suddenly pull out? Don't you think that the rebels will take over and create an even worse, more oppressive and totally choatic 'government' then they had in the first place?
Gaining any votes as a 3rd party seems likely in and of itself to persuade the other 2 parties towards your platform. Any swing state where the 2 parties might be fighting in a 1 or 2 percentage race, if the 3rd party manages to represent even 1%, why not try to appeal to them in your campaigning?
On the other hand, sure they won't win an presidential election for eons to come, but as they slowly creep into the national awareness by having a semi-interesting and noticable presidential election showout it helps the party in virtually every other political campaign that you speak of.
I wonder if the idea of a corporation as being it's own citizen is nonlibertarian, in which case they could just say that the individuals involved in the scandal could all be individually sued by the people they wrongfully ripped off.
That would be a kind of cop out answer though, what would be a lot more interesting for example would be the steps required to eliminate the nonliability of corporate executives.
I'm not a libertarian so I'm just making this all up, but I just figured that the idea of personal responsibility was a big libertarian thing so therefore the idea of corporations limiting the fruad liability of it's employees seems nonlibertarian to me. I wonder what kind of massive downside there would be to limiting corporate liability and replacing it with personal.. some crane operator accidently kills a coworker and in most cases he is held directly responsible in a civil trial and the company gets off without paying a thing?
Well, for what it's worth, the other people who benefited from it didn't until a few years after and any that did had to continue their education on their own. It was a good opener, and what was more important then anything technical we had learned was the experience of creating something, working productively with other people in a predominately cooperative as opposed to competitive environment that we were all used to school fostering.
That doesn't conclude there isn't a crushing authority though, it just suggests that one isn't neccesary for kids to lose interest in learning.
Just my personal opinion, but I consider that oppressive environment to be partially responsible for the situation where kids never feel the _need_ to learn something. In school, they tend to actually _do_ so little. The kids that seem to learn mass amounts quickly and intuitively tend to be the ones that managed to pick up some kind of complex hobby somewhere, the reasons for which are probably extremely varied but could probably mostly be due to parental guidance and support to make the hobby possible. For what it's worth though, I think education tries to kill hobbies as well though by loading kids up with increasing amounts of busy work in their off-school time.
Personally, I just skidded through school with C's and D's because I virtually never did my homework, and spent all that time instead tinkering with computers. Fundamentally it paid off, even the few times I tried to reform myself and apply myself more fully towards school, I wasn't learning more then I was on my own in my freetime. I generally paid attention while in school and learned quite a bit although it often felt like a massive waste of time, especially High School, I just didn't really care about my marks after some point and in a wierd twist of unconventional parental guidance, my parents sort of stopped caring about my grades too and began to trust in what I was doing.
No matter what, I wasn't ever going to nearly as good an academic as I was going to be a highly skilled journeyman style jack of all trades computer guy. I was lucky in a weird way that my teachers sort of stopped trying to push me.. My ideal situation would have been to replace relatively mundane classes with basically vocational work periods to accomplish goals.. Luckily enough through a pretty complex set of events involving just how poor $$$ wise my school was, my senior year I got exactly that. 4 out of 6 periods were involved with building/administrating multiple computer labs from scratch on donated busted computers. Getting a technology education experience that was probably in the top 0.1% in the state while going to school that was probably in the lower 10% for funding was a pretty sweet irony.
If that was too round about to hook up to my first point, basically, up until that point, I had a pretty miserable education experience. I basically felt imprisoned, I was just going to coast along and serve time until the government said I could be free. But as soon as I got the freedom and opportunity to do something on my own, my life flipped a 180 and I made up for a lot of wasted time in one year. The opportunity was so profound that I literally felt that all the served time was worth it, just to get so lucky.
"Some students are going to misbehave, cause trouble, underperform, or fail, and we should let them. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up, and you don't get increasing results by applying declining standards."
This is a great statement. I have a slightly different perspective on it though. While my line of thinking, which is really just a sort of wishful thought, only seems to lead to declining standards, I think that the conventional measures for determining 'success' or 'failure' in education are pretty flawed to begin with.
I went through 12 years of public education dealing with a constant expectation from parents and faculty that I should be getting straight A's instead of more or less a straight line of C's and D's. This expectation came from my general demeanor, and several years of intelligence testing and counselling. None of it would change the fact that I had no work ethic when it came to school assignments. I simply wouldn't, nearly couldn't, perform their repetitive chore version of learning.
I was naturally curious, asked a ton of questions, generally would pay attention in class and I learned a lot that way, I was lucky that many teachers just gave me a benefit of the doubt in terms of their actual opinion of my intelligence, but that was often a source of frustration for both them and me as it almost never helped my letter grade. In this sense, I was in some small way benefited by a sort of declining standard. It wasn't full on decline because I still received low marks, but at least very few faculty actually seemed to look down on me, in the way that my parents describe how their teachers treated kids with low marks. As I got older, teachers generally gave me less and less of the benefit of the doubt and I progressively withdrew from caring about my education.
It wasn't until my senior year in High School that I realized that my way had been nearly the best for me overall and I regained most of the confidence in my own intelligence that I had slowly lost through years of mediocre marks. Naturally what I had been doing with all that time I should've been doing homework was spent working on computers.
What happened my senior year that was particularly lucky was a great irony, because my school was so fiscally poor, I was able to convince a couple key faculty that we should build a computer lab using a few underdeployed computers they had received on random donation, and that I knew how to do most of the work. For some reason, even with my poor reputation as a student, I was able to impress them with the proposal. With the sponsorship of one particularly progressive teacher I was able to waive nearly half of my classes since I'd already satisfied most of the curricular graduation requirements. We started out fairly small, but donations of mostly broken old computers started pouring in and we basically floored big chunks of the school district with how much we were able to do with so little by basically leveraging my skills for free. To them the scale of our technology project was unfathomable in such a cash deprived district.
What really brought my confidence back though was when old teachers in whose classes I earned D's and F's inevitably swung by to check out what the big deal was and they saw what it was I was actually good at. The reactions were varied, a couple were actually hostilely dismisive to some extent, seemingly jealous that something could actually be created in such a forsaken environment, but particularly satisfying to me were a few teachers that actually apologized to me, a few years after I even had them as a teacher. They were just apologizing for their impression of my overall ability and were worried that I may have felt that they just wrote me off. At that point I was basically working with quite a bit of the faculty as more of a peer then a student as we expanded the network and tried to introduce extra PCs into various classes and train them on the software.
Although the most hilarious aspect o
Perhaps they are aliens capable of time travel that received a satellite transmission from us of the particulars of the activity of our telescope millions of years from now. Then they went back in time millions of years before now and programmed their transmitter so that it would perfectly sync up with our attempts to observe.
For some reason.
I think you entirely miss the point that part of what makes it an interesting story is that fact. His 'by the way' statement is merely pointing it out, and the way he phrased "looked like your stereotypical 'hacker'", with 'hacker' in quotes suggests that he is aware of a potentially prejudiced stereotype and it's use for potential profiling, and that in this case that profiling was not applied because a priest was targetted, basically it was pointing out a bit irony.
You take his 'by the way' matter of fact statement all the way to point of thinking he is advocating prejudice. I think you are prejudiced by having such a knee jerk reaction on such little information. Even the assumption that he is advocating anything in the first place has no real foundation.
Coding an opensource game is generally done by it's developers for their own fun. This notion that they are somehow naturally trying to compete with commericial games is kind of like saying that a local informal softball team is getting whooped by a major league team. They aren't even playing against each other.
Selfishly I hope Naruto is never licensed over here, losing the fansub and distribution support would really suck.
But much more troublesome, I just can't picture where this show fits in in an American timeslot. If you leave it unedited, it's too bloody and racy for a normal kid's show, but it won't make enough money in a late time slot and it's main appeal $$$ wise is probably the wide array of markettable characters for toys, etc. So basically it just seems like any license will edit out tons of good stuff.
They should just leave it the way it is now, but try to bring over all the merchandise (assuming there is some) and see what happens.
"As Steven Spielberg told The Associated Press recently, PG-13 puts "hot sauce" on a movie in the viewer's mind."
Blah, more like mixing hot sauce with milk. Aiming just below the R for the more profitable PG-13 has ruined many movies in my mind. Giving up grit and realism for something more palatable to censors while thrashing the original vision.
As I understand it, Everquest has a considerably more expensive server you can play on, like $60 a month or something? Does anybody know if that is actually effective in making it a better play environment through the idea that your common harassing player won't dish out that much? I'm sure a common reaction would be that only tools would pay that much and thus it could be even worse, but if you really are an avid player playing 3-6 hours a night, it would seem that an extra $50 a month would be worth if it made those 90-180 hours significantly better. I wonder if this real world parallel of trying to price out people who can't or just don't care enough to pay more will catch on in terms of online communities.
Then it's really just an issue where there is no usable classification for the degree. The basic problem is that no jobs are looking for degrees in "Applied Computing" They have virtually no choice but to call it computer science because of the relationship between jobs and diplomas.
That's kind of what I was saying when I said that the best people I've encountered all have personal interest in computing that keeps them current. Absolutely no degree is going to carry you forever in the field alone. I just have a feeling that a computer science program with an strong emphasis on projects and building experience through them is going to be more immensely more useful then one with an emphasis on sitting in classes, listening to lectures and taking written tests.
So, what if you've had a lifelong interest in computing, and a distaste for formal education. You dropped out of college during the boom, got a pretty good job and several years of rapidly advancing experience. All your friends who stayed in college wish they'd dropped out too because now they've graduated into a lousy job market and are having a hell of a time getting any decent experience under their respective belts.
But you are beginning to wish you had that piece of paper, you think you can probably keep doing pretty good without it, but you wonder where the cieling is without it.
A program like the one this article about is appealing because of how quickly you can get it out of the way, but it just doesn't seem appropriate because it being so specific technology based, you probably already know a significant majority of it.
What you most ideally want educationally isn't the fundamentals of all of computer science, but access to a body of applied experience on dealing with large complex projects. Design is your biggest weakness because you've been flying by the seat of your pants, your experience is filling in the gaps naturally, but you really wish there was somebody to mentor with that had at least some of the answers, right now most people look to you for solutions and as you look behind at what you've created, you see so much room for refactoring its kind of painful.
Is there an ideal solution? Taking the quick program to just get the piece of paper seems like it could be the most insanely easy thing to do. But can you get the piece of paper in a quick way and get an educational experience that is actually useful? What about simply expanding your horizons in a totally new direction? What kind of rapid degree programs are there in other fields?
But you have to admit that it's probably going to be a more applicable education for the jobs that most computer science grads go into. It's difficult for me to not have a fairly biased opinion here just because of my personal experience in the workplace. So far, all the best programmers/DBAs/admins I've dealt with don't come from CS backgrounds, but from just about everything else imaginable and they all tend to have developed their applicable computing skills largely on their own.
It's almost like the conclusion of formal CS training had a tendency to shut down the desire or ability to keep learning, but those who's knowledge of technology was never formally shaped never had that kind of closure. There's this idea that CS education sets a foundation in theory that will take you through all technologies, but it really seems like we are still in a phase where things are too immature and developing too quickly to assume that foundation won't need to be dug up several times.
It's fair to say that I have not had much exposure to the higher echelons of people coming out of truly great CS programs, I'm not disputing the existence of the best of the best, I'm making a generalization about my impression of computer science education on average. I feel that it tends to be largely inapplicable. Methodology and technology just keep changing for better or worse, the true key to your ability to stay applicable is to simply have personal interest as far as I can tell.
By far the best part of a computer education is engaging in large projects. Any program that puts an emphasis on projects I think is starting off on the right path. I'd go so far as to say that even on day 1 some form of significantly complex project should be established as a longer term goal, probably a yet-to-be-decided selection amongst projects to get people imagining how what they are learning could potentially be applied as they learn it. Even if that approach leads to some early golden hammerism where every single thing they learn is attempted to be applied to the wrong problems, that experience would be invaluable.
Fundamentally after a certain point, typing speed is only totally benefiting people who are performing data entry or perform many informal communications with many people simultaneously. There have been a few times while IMing with coworkers, that typing my response too fast can actually distract them and make them nervous to some extent.
Of course the even more annoying habit is crafting a response to what you expect them to say before they even say it, and just hitting enter if they do.. or just putting it in the clipboard if they don't. (shift-home ctrl-x)
To me the big difference in speed between two computer users peforming the same task they already know how to do is their knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, not their ability to type words fast. They seem to be notoriously difficult to get people to want to learn.