I know this is going to seem like trolling, but humour me here. What is it, that people honestly see in this distribution?
At the time when I started using ubuntu, ca. 2005, there were two reasons I liked it: (1) apt, and (2) a usable set of up to date packages (as opposed to debian's loooong release cycle).
I used both Jaunty and Intrepid; Jaunty for probably two months. I've been using Linux for 15 years now, and I honestly feel that Ubuntu was, without any hyperbole, the single worst Linux distribution that I've ever seen. I absolutely hated it.
Yes, if your experience started with Intrepid and Jaunty, then this reaction is very reasonable. They're both terrible releases.
Sound (ALSA) dropping out randomly and continually
If you can get sound to work at all, then you're one up on me. Sound is completely broken for me in Karmic.
with Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system, were the three main reasons. I don't like Gnome at all, and when I tried to remove it, rapidly found that I couldn't. I generally use Ratpoison in either Linux or FreeBSD.
Yep. I use fluxbox, and I'm experiencing similar problems. Lots of functionality simply doesn't work in any desktop other than gnome.
The complicated-looking characters are actually built out of smaller, standardized parts. If your kids want to be able to look up characters in a dictionary, they're going to have to learn to recognize the more common Kangxi radicals anyway. The 7 most common radicals are used in about 10,000 characters. Most characters are formed by combining a semantic part with a phonetic part. Once you learn a bunch of these, it makes it much easier to remember words made out of them. Lots of words are actually compounds of characters, e.g., "computer" is "electric brain." Once you know "electric" and "brain," it's not particularly hard to remember the two-character compound.
It sounds like in the short term your kids are having an easier time with the spoken language than with the writing system. My experience in terms of long-term recall is exactly the opposite.
I took a Chinese class 13 years ago, and have forgotten the vast majority of what I learned. Of the part I do remember, the easiest to remember is characters. The part I really can't remember at all anymore is what tones the words are. E.g., I can remember that "red" is "hua," but I can't remember which tone that "hua" is. Because of that, I have no chance at all of being able to speak and be understood.
You're right that the Kindle is not capable of handling textbooks. That is generally seen as one of the things the iPad is designed to do better than the Kindle.
PDF is an awful format for textbooks and reference books.
It could eliminate the need for students to buy and carry bound textbooks and an array of other tools.
Huh? "Carry" is one thing, "buy" is another. It's true that free textbooks exist (see my sig), but they are not yet all that popular in K-12 or colleges. California has a Free Digital Textbook Initiative for high schools, but it has not yet reshaped the landscape; the traditional commercial publishers are essentially sitting it out.
So I don't see why a cheap tablet would eliminate the need for students to buy textbooks. Publishers are already offering DRM'd electronic textbooks, at about the same price as print textbooks. K-12 schools that are using non-free books will still need to buy books for their kids. College students will still need to buy books.
Actually, the traditional publishers love DRM'd e-books, because it's a way for them to kill off the used book market. They can use the DRM to prevent you from selling your copy if you don't want it when you're done with the class.
The books I use in my physics courses at a community college are all free online as DRM-free PDFs. Even so, the vast majority of my students end up buying a printed copy. (I don't receive any royalty from the printed books. They're priced pretty cheap, about the same as photocopying.) Maybe some of them are not going digital because they can't afford a laptop, but I suspect that in most cases, they actually perceive a printed book as more convenient than an electronic one. Reading a book off the screen of a laptop is a pain in the ass. It's much nicer and easier to be able to see two full pages at once, in a large format, and to be able to riffle through pages.
The paper is not entirely unreasonable. However, there are at least some holes in it.
It lumps good and bad security advice together. The economic benefit of following bad security advice (e.g., buying antivirus software) is zero or negative, so of course anybody would be rational to ignore such advice. That doesn't mean it should be lumped together with *good* security advice. They're hypothesizing that people are acting like the idealized economic free agents beloved of economists: people with perfect information, acting rationally. Under this hypothesis, people would have perfect information about which security advice is good and which is bad.
The article doesn't talk about costs to others. People who get their computers owned by a botnet aren't only suffering economic harm themselves, they're inflicting harm on other people. On p. 5 Herley talks about how Wells Fargo limits customers' liability to $50 if they're victims of fraud. That doesn't mean *nobody* pays the cost of the fraud. We all pay those costs, indirectly.
Another problem is that in many cases Herley relies on back-of-the-envelope estimates of the damage caused by security failures. E.g., on p. 2 he estimates the economic costs of a particular exploit. But these estimates aren't based on any actual data. That particular calculation is also kind of stupid, because he says that a user shouldn't spend more than "0.98 seconds" (doesn't he understand significant figures?) protecting against a particular exploit. What his analysis ignores is that there may be hundreds of such exploits out there, and that anything you do that protects against one exploit (e.g., not using a dictionary word as your password) will also help to protect you against all the others. And forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of low-ball estimates originating from MS of the economic damage of computer security failures. That's like trusting GM to estimate the economic effects of global warming.
On a related note, the thing I really dread is support and testing for Windows. I have an open-source app I wrote that is cross-platform. I use it on Linux, but it also runs on Windows. Since I don't own a Windows machine and don't know anything about Windows, it makes it a real pain to test on Windows or reproduce bugs that only occur on Windows. Packaging for Windows is also a hassle. Of course there is wine, but testing in wine isn't the same thing as testing on a real Windows box. And even if I do succeed in reproducing a Windows-specific bug in wine, that doesn't mean that I understand enough about the Windows environment and APIs to be able to fix it.
The artist's rendition shows two spherical bodies, but there's no way that can be correct. At the orbital velocities involved these things must have tidal bulges that make Kevin Smith look positively svelte!
You're right, the artist's conception is messed up. Here is the scientific paper. Figure 3 on p. 4 has a realistic diagram, showing one star completely filling its Roche lobe.
Anyway, this is cool because this system is much closer and higher in frequency than the classic Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar. That means that it's radiating gravitational waves at a much higher rate.
The Newsweek article is about getting rid of incompetent teachers. The NYT article is mainly about figuring out specific teaching techniques that are effective. I doubt that either of these will have any positive effect on K-12 education in the U.S. -- in fact, I'm convinced that essentially nothing that our society does as a whole can have any significant effect on average educational outcomes.
Our school system sends kids to schools near where they live. Where you live correlates with your family's income and education. By the time a kid is old enough for school, a number of extremely powerful factors have been at work in determining how well the kid will do in school. One kid grows up in a house full of books; the parents subscribe to newspapers; the adults talk about intellectual things at the dinner table. The other kid grows up in a house with no books or newspapers; the parents spend their free time watching TV.
Let's say the authors of the Newsweek article get their way, and bad teachers are fired. The problem is that (a) the school now has to hire a replacement, and (b) there's a reason why the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around. There is a job market for schoolteachers. The reason the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around was because they had a lousy pool of applicants. Why did they have a lousy pool of applicants? Most likely because this is a school where 90% of the kids qualify for the free lunch program. The best teachers generally don't want to teach in that kind of environment. They know that if they teach in that environment, they're getting the kids who have been growing up with TV and no books. They know they're going to spend more time on discipline than on academics. They know that a lot of the families are financially unstable, so they're always on the move; of the faces in the classroom on the first day of class, maybe 40% will have been replaced with new faces by the last day of the year.
The NYT article talks about improving specific skills that teachers need. But they also admit that that can't make up for lack of subject knowledge, especially in math. As one of the articles notes, teaching and nursing are no longer the only career options for smart, talented women. I'm a college professor, and when I taught classes specifically targeted at preservice K-12 teachers, they were the worst students I'd ever had. In the job market, the vast majority of people applying for K-12 teaching jobs are just not such great students. In the US, 80% of them have bachelor's degrees education, meaning that they basically got a diploma without ever having to learn a deep and specific body of knowledge in any particular subject. Sure, a few people do go to highly selective schools, get stellar grades in a real academic subject, and then move on to a career in K-12 teaching. The problem is that those people are few and far between. When they go on the job market, they have their pick of schools. Most of them are going to end up in affluent, suburban districts.
I've had an experience with Attributor myself, and it's given me a pretty low opinion of them. I'm the author of a CC-BY-SA-licensed calculus textbook, titled "Calculus." Someone posted a copy of the pdf on Scribd, as allowed by the license. So one day I got an email from one of the people who runs Scribd, saying that Attributor had sent them a takedown notice, which they were skeptical about. Attributor hadn't supplied any useful information about what they thought was a violation. I called Scribd, and they checked and said it was a mistake -- they were working for Macmillan, which publishes another book titled "Calculus." So here they were, serving a DMCA notice under penality of perjury, and they hadn't even checked whether the name of the author was the same, or whether any of the text was the same. Their bot just found that the title, "Calculus," was the same as the title of one of their client's books. Pretty scummy.
He just brushed away the two very important issues of the Kubuntu Desktop and sound. Now, what he was doing there is is meeting a "your distro sucks" accusation with a "does not!" reply which is to some degree fair. However that doesn't change the apparently common opinion that the Kubuntu desktop is crap, and sound is just flat out broken.
Yep. It's one thing to put out a bad release. It's another thing entirely to deny that it was a bad release. Asay's entire answer to davidm2005's question and my question seems to be nothing but denial that there's a problem. Very disappointing. I've gotten a lot of good mileage out of ubuntu, but if the attitude is that they can't even admit that they have quality control problems, then I guess it's time to look around for another distro that actually cares about quality.
In some ethical systems, privacy includes protecting most "hidden" information - like what's in a person's DNA even if it is anonymous. And some people have a moral belief that the body is sacred and even "waste parts" deserve respect - so using them for scientific purposes or financial gain would be evil in the same way that hurting an innocent would be.
In some ethical systems, cows are sacred, so every McDonalds in the U.S. should be burned to the ground. In some ethical systems, slavery is considered a good thing for the slaves, because they're not capable of taking care of themselves. In some ethical systems, girls should have their clitorises removed when they reach adolescence.
In the past courts have decided that certain people had no legal right to their own bodies at all. This was called slavery.
That wasn't decided by the courts. It was decided by informal custom, later backed up by the US constitution and various state and federal laws.
Taking a body part without permission is wrong even if it is legal.
This is kind of a complicated issue, because the person involved (a newborn) can't be asked for permission. States generally require newborns to have blood tests, the reason being that there are certain metabolic abnormalities that can cause mental retardation if not recognized. If was retarded, and my retardation could have been avoided if my parents had allowed my blood to be tested...well, I'd be mad as hell at my parents.
That's because I gave them explicit consent to use said tissue sample to facilitate my diagnosis. If they use it for any other purpose without my consent then it's a breach of contract.
In addition, if you are worried consider that future buyers may also be worried. Unless you plan to either die in the apartment or leave it to your children, resale ability and ease of resale may be things you wish to consider.
If the existence of the cell tower is obvious, then the apartment's current asking price probably already factors this in. He should research the prices that comparable apartments are selling for in that area. If the asking price is significantly below what you'd expect based on the price per square foot of comparable properties in the area, then that's probably evidence that the seller knows it's an issue, and all potential buyers know it's an issue. Then once the OP convinces himself that it's not a health issue (which is isn't, because it's non-ionizing radiation), he gets it at a low price, and when he sells it he'll also sell it at a low price. Say the reduction is $50k. The net gain on the transaction is unaffected by the cell tower. However, he gets to keep $50k in the stock market or whatever instead of locking it up in a non-liquid piece of real estate.
If it's not obvious to potential buyers that microwaves are passing through it, or if the price is not significantly less than comparable properties, then he should probably not buy it, because he might get screwed on resale when potential buyers realize the microwave situation.
You are wrong. When a person discards human waste, hair, nail, urine, feces, saliva, blood, cancer cells or whatever there is no legal expectation of privacy or property as you say. However when a tissue sample is given there is an expectation that it will be used ONLY for the purpose for which it was given. Any other use without the explicit permission of the owner is wrong and should be prohibited. [...] In the case of whether a doctor would need permission for a tissue sample to be entered into a database or some other and especially commercial use would be clear. A person's tissue is his property and cannot be used for purposes other than what he has explicitly permitted. In the case of the cancer patient you mentioned her body would become property of her estate and any use commercial or otherwise would need to be approved by the patient's heirs. If profits are made from a tissue sample then the heirs are entitled to royalties.
The post you're responding to was specifically about the ethical issues involved, not the legal ones. However, your post seems to be entirely a description of what you think the law says. You're incorrect about the law. (I assume we're talking about U.S. law here, since TFA was about something that happened in Texas.) Common law has said since Haynes' Case, in 1613, that bodies and parts of bodies are not legal property. This principle was upheld in the U.S. in 1990, in Moore v. Regents of the University of California, which ruled that a cancer patient had no property right relating to the commercial use of his cancer cells. The most recent case to uphold the same principle was Washington University v. Catalona (2006), in which patients sued to get back their samples of prostate tissue, blood, and DNA, and the court ruled that the samples were not their property.
In the 1950s.
Using a 60 year old case as the basis for your argument is intellectually dishonest.
Times have changed since then. Now there are certainly privacy, property, and ethical issues.
With your logic, I could use the Tuskegee experiments as justification for clinical testing on human subjects without their informed consent. Or I could use the Tuskegee experiments as an example of unethical behavior becoming public and Congress stepping in to pass laws regulating experimentation on humans.
I didn't argue that it was morally OK because it had been done before. I explained what the law says, and gave an example.
So there was no legal privacy issue, and no issue of legal property rights. And therefore the issue was moral or ethical, or that the legal system should be changed?
Okay, let's split up the two issues, which are different.
Privacy:
IMO the absence of a privacy violation here is not just a legality. There was no violation of privacy at all in this case. Not violation in any legal sense, and no violation in any ethical sense. The mitochondrial DNA cannot be traced to individuals, so the individuals' privacy has been maintained. It's no more a violation of privacy than if someone had gone to the doctor with a case of syphilis, and the doctor duly reported it as a statistic to some government agency, with no personally identifiable information.
Property:
Re the property side of things, sure, please go ahead and make a case for this. What is the ethical problem with the current legal setup?
It seems to me that the current legal setup is the best one in terms of ethics. It allows medical research to be carried out, without making it necessary for doctors or hospitals to beg and plead and negotiate for the rights to study someone's cancer cells or whatever. Ethically, I don't believe that these people have any property claim. I expel my body wastes into the sewers without any expectation that the city will negotiate with me individually for the possible economic value of those wastes. When I cut my hair and nails, the cuttings go in the trash, and I don't expect the city to enter into a bargaining process with me about what they're worth. IMO we have a situation where there's no ethical expectation that parents will retain any property rights to blood samples taken in the hospital, and where there may be benefits to society in using those samples in various ways. Therefore I don't think it's ethical to allow individuals to veto the use of the samples from their kids. Should they be able to opt out? I don't see why. It would have a negative effect on society by biasing the sample.
This is actually not that unusual. Typically if they take a tissue sample from you at the hospital, it belongs to them, and you have no property rights over it. For an extreme case, check out the story of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cancer in 1951. They took cells from her tumor, kept them alive indefinitely, and commercialized them. Her relatives didn't know about any of this until decades later.
As TFA notes, these blood samples were anonymized, and mitochondrial DNA cannot be traced back to individuals.
So there was no privacy issue, and no issue of property rights. And therefore the issue was...?
The situation today is not that different. For example, deaths in the US and Mexico arising from heroin generally fall into two classes: (1) deaths because importing and selling heroin often involves violent criminal gangs, and (2) deaths because illegal heroin is impure. Both categories of deaths are purely government-inflicted, in the sense that the US government could end them tomorrow if it chose to legalize heroin.
Category #1 is pretty obvious: no more drug-related shootings if the stuff is being grown, imported, refined, packaged, and sold legally.
Category #2 is less well known to most people. When opiates were legal, people would generally just smoke opium. It had some bad health effects (e.g., constipation), but nothing all that deadly. People weren't overdosing from it. If you smoked too much, you fell asleep. Opium was legal in the US until around the turn of the 20th century. During most of the 20th century in the US, people were using extremely impure heroin. The impurities had two effects. One was that if it was maybe 10% heroin and 90% other ingredients, you couldn't get high from smoking or snorting it, so you had to inject it. AIDS transmission through shared needles wouldn't exist if heroin wasn't so impure that it had to be injected. The other was that the impurities themselves (often really nasty, random stuff like Ajax cleanser) could have devastating health effects. When you see a heroin addict who's lost all his teeth, it's because of the impurities, not the drug itself.
More recently, people have started to use black tar heroin imported from Mexico. Here is a series of articles about black tar heroin from the LA Times. This stuff is much cheaper than traditional heroin, so you don't get as many property crimes because druggies are stealing to support their habits. However, the black crud tends to cause collapsed veins and other problems. Also, a lot of people are overdosing because the black tar is stronger than they're used to. If heroin were legal, people would be able to look at the packaging and get accurate information about its strength.
Let's legalize heroin in the US tomorrow. Mexico could pull back from being on the verge of becoming a failed state. People in the US would stop dying. Violent and nonviolent crime would be reduced. The prison population would be greatly reduced. The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, due almost entirely to the failed war on drugs. Keeping all those people in jail is extremely expensive. E.g., California spends more on prisons than on higher education.
Amazon can afford to produce the Kindle at-cost or even with a bit of a loss because they will gain sales in e-books and such.
Amazon loses money on the e-books they sell. They pay about $14 wholesale for the digital version of a newly released hardcover, and only charge the customer about $10.
Why would selling course packs fall under fair use? Certainly a teacher giving handouts of a graph from a paper could claim fair use, but selling them?
The criteria are summarized here. There are a couple of things to note: (a) Criterion #1 contrasts "commercial" with "nonprofit educational." "Commercial" is not the same thing as "selling." My community college sells lots of things (food in the cafeteria,...), but it's not a profit-making enterprise. (b) The four criteria are not supposed to be and-ed together. A certain use can fail one of the four criteria completely, and yet still be fair use.
If you're in a country such as the U.S. that has fair use or something similar, it's important to assert your right to use it. Over the last 50 years, copyright law has been relentlessly shifting in favor of copyright owners, to the point where a lot of people don't realize that fair use even exists.
As an example, I teach at a community college, and at our fall convocation a couple of years back, they passed out brochures put out by a publishers' association about how it's totally illegal to sell course packs without getting permission and paying royalties. The school officials who agreed to pass it out apparently had no clue that fair use existed. If you put a complete short story by Hemingway in a course pack, then, yeah, you're probably not covered by fair use. But if you take a single graph out of a scientific paper and put it in a course pack, then you're absolutely covered by fair use.
It's just like any other freedom. If we want fair use to remain viable, we have to (a) realize it exists, and (b) have the guts to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
A good site for free USGS topo maps: http://libremap.org/
At the time when I started using ubuntu, ca. 2005, there were two reasons I liked it: (1) apt, and (2) a usable set of up to date packages (as opposed to debian's loooong release cycle).
Yes, if your experience started with Intrepid and Jaunty, then this reaction is very reasonable. They're both terrible releases.
If you can get sound to work at all, then you're one up on me. Sound is completely broken for me in Karmic.
Yep. I use fluxbox, and I'm experiencing similar problems. Lots of functionality simply doesn't work in any desktop other than gnome.
The complicated-looking characters are actually built out of smaller, standardized parts. If your kids want to be able to look up characters in a dictionary, they're going to have to learn to recognize the more common Kangxi radicals anyway. The 7 most common radicals are used in about 10,000 characters. Most characters are formed by combining a semantic part with a phonetic part. Once you learn a bunch of these, it makes it much easier to remember words made out of them. Lots of words are actually compounds of characters, e.g., "computer" is "electric brain." Once you know "electric" and "brain," it's not particularly hard to remember the two-character compound.
It sounds like in the short term your kids are having an easier time with the spoken language than with the writing system. My experience in terms of long-term recall is exactly the opposite. I took a Chinese class 13 years ago, and have forgotten the vast majority of what I learned. Of the part I do remember, the easiest to remember is characters. The part I really can't remember at all anymore is what tones the words are. E.g., I can remember that "red" is "hua," but I can't remember which tone that "hua" is. Because of that, I have no chance at all of being able to speak and be understood.
You're right that the Kindle is not capable of handling textbooks. That is generally seen as one of the things the iPad is designed to do better than the Kindle.
What do you not like about PDF?
Huh? "Carry" is one thing, "buy" is another. It's true that free textbooks exist (see my sig), but they are not yet all that popular in K-12 or colleges. California has a Free Digital Textbook Initiative for high schools, but it has not yet reshaped the landscape; the traditional commercial publishers are essentially sitting it out.
So I don't see why a cheap tablet would eliminate the need for students to buy textbooks. Publishers are already offering DRM'd electronic textbooks, at about the same price as print textbooks. K-12 schools that are using non-free books will still need to buy books for their kids. College students will still need to buy books.
Actually, the traditional publishers love DRM'd e-books, because it's a way for them to kill off the used book market. They can use the DRM to prevent you from selling your copy if you don't want it when you're done with the class.
The books I use in my physics courses at a community college are all free online as DRM-free PDFs. Even so, the vast majority of my students end up buying a printed copy. (I don't receive any royalty from the printed books. They're priced pretty cheap, about the same as photocopying.) Maybe some of them are not going digital because they can't afford a laptop, but I suspect that in most cases, they actually perceive a printed book as more convenient than an electronic one. Reading a book off the screen of a laptop is a pain in the ass. It's much nicer and easier to be able to see two full pages at once, in a large format, and to be able to riffle through pages.
The paper is not entirely unreasonable. However, there are at least some holes in it.
It lumps good and bad security advice together. The economic benefit of following bad security advice (e.g., buying antivirus software) is zero or negative, so of course anybody would be rational to ignore such advice. That doesn't mean it should be lumped together with *good* security advice. They're hypothesizing that people are acting like the idealized economic free agents beloved of economists: people with perfect information, acting rationally. Under this hypothesis, people would have perfect information about which security advice is good and which is bad.
The article doesn't talk about costs to others. People who get their computers owned by a botnet aren't only suffering economic harm themselves, they're inflicting harm on other people. On p. 5 Herley talks about how Wells Fargo limits customers' liability to $50 if they're victims of fraud. That doesn't mean *nobody* pays the cost of the fraud. We all pay those costs, indirectly.
Another problem is that in many cases Herley relies on back-of-the-envelope estimates of the damage caused by security failures. E.g., on p. 2 he estimates the economic costs of a particular exploit. But these estimates aren't based on any actual data. That particular calculation is also kind of stupid, because he says that a user shouldn't spend more than "0.98 seconds" (doesn't he understand significant figures?) protecting against a particular exploit. What his analysis ignores is that there may be hundreds of such exploits out there, and that anything you do that protects against one exploit (e.g., not using a dictionary word as your password) will also help to protect you against all the others. And forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of low-ball estimates originating from MS of the economic damage of computer security failures. That's like trusting GM to estimate the economic effects of global warming.
On a related note, the thing I really dread is support and testing for Windows. I have an open-source app I wrote that is cross-platform. I use it on Linux, but it also runs on Windows. Since I don't own a Windows machine and don't know anything about Windows, it makes it a real pain to test on Windows or reproduce bugs that only occur on Windows. Packaging for Windows is also a hassle. Of course there is wine, but testing in wine isn't the same thing as testing on a real Windows box. And even if I do succeed in reproducing a Windows-specific bug in wine, that doesn't mean that I understand enough about the Windows environment and APIs to be able to fix it.
You're right, the artist's conception is messed up. Here is the scientific paper. Figure 3 on p. 4 has a realistic diagram, showing one star completely filling its Roche lobe.
Anyway, this is cool because this system is much closer and higher in frequency than the classic Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar. That means that it's radiating gravitational waves at a much higher rate.
The Newsweek article is about getting rid of incompetent teachers. The NYT article is mainly about figuring out specific teaching techniques that are effective. I doubt that either of these will have any positive effect on K-12 education in the U.S. -- in fact, I'm convinced that essentially nothing that our society does as a whole can have any significant effect on average educational outcomes.
Our school system sends kids to schools near where they live. Where you live correlates with your family's income and education. By the time a kid is old enough for school, a number of extremely powerful factors have been at work in determining how well the kid will do in school. One kid grows up in a house full of books; the parents subscribe to newspapers; the adults talk about intellectual things at the dinner table. The other kid grows up in a house with no books or newspapers; the parents spend their free time watching TV.
Let's say the authors of the Newsweek article get their way, and bad teachers are fired. The problem is that (a) the school now has to hire a replacement, and (b) there's a reason why the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around. There is a job market for schoolteachers. The reason the school hired a lousy candidate the first time around was because they had a lousy pool of applicants. Why did they have a lousy pool of applicants? Most likely because this is a school where 90% of the kids qualify for the free lunch program. The best teachers generally don't want to teach in that kind of environment. They know that if they teach in that environment, they're getting the kids who have been growing up with TV and no books. They know they're going to spend more time on discipline than on academics. They know that a lot of the families are financially unstable, so they're always on the move; of the faces in the classroom on the first day of class, maybe 40% will have been replaced with new faces by the last day of the year.
The NYT article talks about improving specific skills that teachers need. But they also admit that that can't make up for lack of subject knowledge, especially in math. As one of the articles notes, teaching and nursing are no longer the only career options for smart, talented women. I'm a college professor, and when I taught classes specifically targeted at preservice K-12 teachers, they were the worst students I'd ever had. In the job market, the vast majority of people applying for K-12 teaching jobs are just not such great students. In the US, 80% of them have bachelor's degrees education, meaning that they basically got a diploma without ever having to learn a deep and specific body of knowledge in any particular subject. Sure, a few people do go to highly selective schools, get stellar grades in a real academic subject, and then move on to a career in K-12 teaching. The problem is that those people are few and far between. When they go on the job market, they have their pick of schools. Most of them are going to end up in affluent, suburban districts.
Oops, important correction to the parent post: "I called Attributor, and they checked and said it was a mistake -- they were working for Macmillan..."
I've had an experience with Attributor myself, and it's given me a pretty low opinion of them. I'm the author of a CC-BY-SA-licensed calculus textbook, titled "Calculus." Someone posted a copy of the pdf on Scribd, as allowed by the license. So one day I got an email from one of the people who runs Scribd, saying that Attributor had sent them a takedown notice, which they were skeptical about. Attributor hadn't supplied any useful information about what they thought was a violation. I called Scribd, and they checked and said it was a mistake -- they were working for Macmillan, which publishes another book titled "Calculus." So here they were, serving a DMCA notice under penality of perjury, and they hadn't even checked whether the name of the author was the same, or whether any of the text was the same. Their bot just found that the title, "Calculus," was the same as the title of one of their client's books. Pretty scummy.
Yep. It's one thing to put out a bad release. It's another thing entirely to deny that it was a bad release. Asay's entire answer to davidm2005's question and my question seems to be nothing but denial that there's a problem. Very disappointing. I've gotten a lot of good mileage out of ubuntu, but if the attitude is that they can't even admit that they have quality control problems, then I guess it's time to look around for another distro that actually cares about quality.
In some ethical systems, cows are sacred, so every McDonalds in the U.S. should be burned to the ground. In some ethical systems, slavery is considered a good thing for the slaves, because they're not capable of taking care of themselves. In some ethical systems, girls should have their clitorises removed when they reach adolescence.
That wasn't decided by the courts. It was decided by informal custom, later backed up by the US constitution and various state and federal laws.
This is kind of a complicated issue, because the person involved (a newborn) can't be asked for permission. States generally require newborns to have blood tests, the reason being that there are certain metabolic abnormalities that can cause mental retardation if not recognized. If was retarded, and my retardation could have been avoided if my parents had allowed my blood to be tested...well, I'd be mad as hell at my parents.
Sounds like you're describing how you'd like the law to be. The law just doesn't happen to be that way.
If the existence of the cell tower is obvious, then the apartment's current asking price probably already factors this in. He should research the prices that comparable apartments are selling for in that area. If the asking price is significantly below what you'd expect based on the price per square foot of comparable properties in the area, then that's probably evidence that the seller knows it's an issue, and all potential buyers know it's an issue. Then once the OP convinces himself that it's not a health issue (which is isn't, because it's non-ionizing radiation), he gets it at a low price, and when he sells it he'll also sell it at a low price. Say the reduction is $50k. The net gain on the transaction is unaffected by the cell tower. However, he gets to keep $50k in the stock market or whatever instead of locking it up in a non-liquid piece of real estate.
If it's not obvious to potential buyers that microwaves are passing through it, or if the price is not significantly less than comparable properties, then he should probably not buy it, because he might get screwed on resale when potential buyers realize the microwave situation.
The post you're responding to was specifically about the ethical issues involved, not the legal ones. However, your post seems to be entirely a description of what you think the law says. You're incorrect about the law. (I assume we're talking about U.S. law here, since TFA was about something that happened in Texas.) Common law has said since Haynes' Case, in 1613, that bodies and parts of bodies are not legal property. This principle was upheld in the U.S. in 1990, in Moore v. Regents of the University of California, which ruled that a cancer patient had no property right relating to the commercial use of his cancer cells. The most recent case to uphold the same principle was Washington University v. Catalona (2006), in which patients sued to get back their samples of prostate tissue, blood, and DNA, and the court ruled that the samples were not their property.
I didn't argue that it was morally OK because it had been done before. I explained what the law says, and gave an example.
Okay, let's split up the two issues, which are different.
Privacy:
IMO the absence of a privacy violation here is not just a legality. There was no violation of privacy at all in this case. Not violation in any legal sense, and no violation in any ethical sense. The mitochondrial DNA cannot be traced to individuals, so the individuals' privacy has been maintained. It's no more a violation of privacy than if someone had gone to the doctor with a case of syphilis, and the doctor duly reported it as a statistic to some government agency, with no personally identifiable information.
Property:
Re the property side of things, sure, please go ahead and make a case for this. What is the ethical problem with the current legal setup?
It seems to me that the current legal setup is the best one in terms of ethics. It allows medical research to be carried out, without making it necessary for doctors or hospitals to beg and plead and negotiate for the rights to study someone's cancer cells or whatever. Ethically, I don't believe that these people have any property claim. I expel my body wastes into the sewers without any expectation that the city will negotiate with me individually for the possible economic value of those wastes. When I cut my hair and nails, the cuttings go in the trash, and I don't expect the city to enter into a bargaining process with me about what they're worth. IMO we have a situation where there's no ethical expectation that parents will retain any property rights to blood samples taken in the hospital, and where there may be benefits to society in using those samples in various ways. Therefore I don't think it's ethical to allow individuals to veto the use of the samples from their kids. Should they be able to opt out? I don't see why. It would have a negative effect on society by biasing the sample.
This is actually not that unusual. Typically if they take a tissue sample from you at the hospital, it belongs to them, and you have no property rights over it. For an extreme case, check out the story of Henrietta Lacks, who died of cancer in 1951. They took cells from her tumor, kept them alive indefinitely, and commercialized them. Her relatives didn't know about any of this until decades later.
As TFA notes, these blood samples were anonymized, and mitochondrial DNA cannot be traced back to individuals.
So there was no privacy issue, and no issue of property rights. And therefore the issue was...?
In 1933, a drug called alcohol was legalized in the U.S.
The situation today is not that different. For example, deaths in the US and Mexico arising from heroin generally fall into two classes: (1) deaths because importing and selling heroin often involves violent criminal gangs, and (2) deaths because illegal heroin is impure. Both categories of deaths are purely government-inflicted, in the sense that the US government could end them tomorrow if it chose to legalize heroin.
Category #1 is pretty obvious: no more drug-related shootings if the stuff is being grown, imported, refined, packaged, and sold legally.
Category #2 is less well known to most people. When opiates were legal, people would generally just smoke opium. It had some bad health effects (e.g., constipation), but nothing all that deadly. People weren't overdosing from it. If you smoked too much, you fell asleep. Opium was legal in the US until around the turn of the 20th century. During most of the 20th century in the US, people were using extremely impure heroin. The impurities had two effects. One was that if it was maybe 10% heroin and 90% other ingredients, you couldn't get high from smoking or snorting it, so you had to inject it. AIDS transmission through shared needles wouldn't exist if heroin wasn't so impure that it had to be injected. The other was that the impurities themselves (often really nasty, random stuff like Ajax cleanser) could have devastating health effects. When you see a heroin addict who's lost all his teeth, it's because of the impurities, not the drug itself.
More recently, people have started to use black tar heroin imported from Mexico. Here is a series of articles about black tar heroin from the LA Times. This stuff is much cheaper than traditional heroin, so you don't get as many property crimes because druggies are stealing to support their habits. However, the black crud tends to cause collapsed veins and other problems. Also, a lot of people are overdosing because the black tar is stronger than they're used to. If heroin were legal, people would be able to look at the packaging and get accurate information about its strength.
Let's legalize heroin in the US tomorrow. Mexico could pull back from being on the verge of becoming a failed state. People in the US would stop dying. Violent and nonviolent crime would be reduced. The prison population would be greatly reduced. The US has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, due almost entirely to the failed war on drugs. Keeping all those people in jail is extremely expensive. E.g., California spends more on prisons than on higher education.
Amazon loses money on the e-books they sell. They pay about $14 wholesale for the digital version of a newly released hardcover, and only charge the customer about $10.
The criteria are summarized here. There are a couple of things to note: (a) Criterion #1 contrasts "commercial" with "nonprofit educational." "Commercial" is not the same thing as "selling." My community college sells lots of things (food in the cafeteria, ...), but it's not a profit-making enterprise. (b) The four criteria are not supposed to be and-ed together. A certain use can fail one of the four criteria completely, and yet still be fair use.
If you're in a country such as the U.S. that has fair use or something similar, it's important to assert your right to use it. Over the last 50 years, copyright law has been relentlessly shifting in favor of copyright owners, to the point where a lot of people don't realize that fair use even exists.
As an example, I teach at a community college, and at our fall convocation a couple of years back, they passed out brochures put out by a publishers' association about how it's totally illegal to sell course packs without getting permission and paying royalties. The school officials who agreed to pass it out apparently had no clue that fair use existed. If you put a complete short story by Hemingway in a course pack, then, yeah, you're probably not covered by fair use. But if you take a single graph out of a scientific paper and put it in a course pack, then you're absolutely covered by fair use.
It's just like any other freedom. If we want fair use to remain viable, we have to (a) realize it exists, and (b) have the guts to use it.