Talk to high school teachers and college professors. Some of the kids *are* writing as poorly in school as they are on the internet.
I wrote that, and you completely missed my point. So let me explain it to you: The point is that some kids (and adults) have *always* had poor writing skills, and that the internet has done nothing to make the situation worse, and has, in fact, *improved* literacy among todays youth.
IMO, "It's informal!" is just a variant of the timeless string of excuses given for not actually knowing how to do it right.
Oh please, that's bullshit. When I'm speaking to a friend over the phone, I speak in a colloquial style. The same is true of writing, and always has been.
Yeah, informal standards are relaxed, but seriously, no one flips back and forth between decent writing style and horrible txt-speak.
They don't? I suppose you have studies that demonstrate this? You aren't just, you know, making arbitrary shit up to support your point, are you?
Seriously, get over yourself. Todays kids are fine.
If that's the case then they probably need lessons in presentation & giving a good impression from their parents & teachers
What part of "informal forum" don't you understand? Unless you have proof that these kids are habitually breaking grammar and spelling rules in *formal* communications, you complaints are baseless.
Not to mention the fact that these kids will need to apply for jobs some day and I doubt they'll get very far if they use the same sloppiness in their CVs/resumes.
And you assume they'll do this because...? Oh, right, because you're already biased to assume the current generation are a crop of idiots.
And, and as an aside, is it *really* so hard to type out the word "and"? Ignoring the fact that your entire first paragraph is a convoluted run-on sentence...
However, what really shocks me is the level of their language and grammar skills.
Evidentally you've never read the average high school English essay. Guess what? Most people, no matter the generation, have rather poor writing skills. Doubly so on an informal forum where spelling and grammar aren't considered important.
Seriously, get over it. Today's youths are probably *more* literate than any previous generation, specifically because they spend so much time on the internet.
My youngest son has learning difficulties and we've put in a lot of work to get him to the stage that he can learn at a normal school. it's an autism spectrum issue.
Uhuh. So, let me get this straight: Your little anecdotal experience with your mildly autistic child somehow refutes this study.
Totally OT, I know, but just FYI, you don't write "a javascript". It's not "java script", it's javascript. After all, I don't "write a python" or "a perl", do I? No. I write a "python script" or a "perl script". So yes, the correct phrasing is "a javascript script", which sounds a little ridiculous, but is nevertheless correct. Or you could use the less clumsy "a javascript program" or "a javascript application". Or you could rephrase it as "If John Carmack can write software to control thrust for a vertical takeoff rocket in javascript". But please, not "a javascript". It just sounds silly.
I rather suspect they decided to not do that *right now* for political reasons.
That's what I said. I don't give a crap if, in some hypothetical future, the Firefox devs suddenly realize that maybe user needs should actually trump ridiculous political posturing. The point is that now, today, there is a perfectly valid, legal, reasonable solution for supporting *any* codec in an HTML5 video element (well, any codec supported by gstreamer), but they're choosing not to implement it for strictly ideological reasons.
Right now they have nothing to worry about (except maybe inconveniencing some foul-mouthed slashdot poster that can't be bothered to search for solutions, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/83149/ ).
Uh, that's not a solution. Hell, did you even read the description of the addon? All it does is s/<video>/<embed>/. That's it. You lose all the integrated DOM support, video overlays, and all the other crap that makes the video element superior to straight object embedding.
*now* is the right time to make a stand and raise awareness about how detrimental patents are to free software.
Please, that's garbage. The battle is lost. It's been lost ever since Flash moved to H.264, and probably long before then. This little fight Firefox is putting up is pointless, and in the end, it's the users that will lose out.
Firefox needs only to ship with generic gstreamer support for it's video element, just as Fennec will be doing. Then you can install any damn gstreamer codec implementation you want, and it'll be available to Firefox. Problem is, the Firefox devs decided they don't want to do that for political reasons, and so Fennec's implementation won't be ported to Firefox. Thank you asshole developers!
In my country, I can choose at least four different ISPs that serve my house, with multiple offers (ADSL, Cable and now optical fiber).
No, if I had to bet, you have two, or maybe three real ISPs: a telecom with ADSL infrastructure, a cable operator with coaxial infrastructure, and now a fibre operator, who may in fact be one of the other two, unless you're really lucky (like someone who lives in an area where Verizon FiOS is deployed).
See, if you actually wanted to deploy a *real* ISP, you would have to lay out millions if not billions of dollars to lay new cable. And that's an obvious, massive barrier to entry into the market... after all, last I checked, your average local ISP didn't have the money to lay new copper.
Of course, these supposed "ISPs" could lease the network from an existing competitor, but that requires government regulation mandating the operator do so, which isn't very "free-marketey", now is it? Of course, that's because the government needs to step in to correct a market distortion as a result of ISPs being a *natural monopoly* due to those aforementioned barriers to entry.
Command and control economies lead to scarcity, a fact born out repeatedly in history.
The fact that you can't see a difference between "command and control economies" and modern single-payer healthcare speaks volumes about the level of your intellect (though, to be fair, it's probably typical for a libertarian).
Ah, I see. So since you can't reason effectively, you just change the subject.
"HTA" is not rationing. Furthermore, "HTA" *exactly* the same thing that insurance companies in the US already do today: examine treatment options with the goal of optimizing the cost-benefit ratio.
Okay, that's not strictly true. Insurance companies couldn't care less about the benefit, so long as it reduces cost.
And as an aside, availability of drugs is not an indicator of quality of care. Furthermore, while a wider variety of drugs may be *sold* in the US, that says absolutely nothing about actual availability on the ground.
And no, I don't plan to read the rest of your little think-tank article. Organizations such as those are nothing more than shills for big business, and I have better things to do than examine their corporate-funded musings.
That would have to be provided by the last-mile provider, aka the municipality.
billing
So, sure, a corporation can do the paperwork and add overhead. Woo.
support
Again, last-mile activity. That's the city's job, remember?
home installation of equipment
*Also* a last-mile activity. Do you even remember what you proposed?
value add services
But ISPs don't need to provide services. That's why we *have* an internet. So we can access services. Hell, what do ISPs provide, today? Email, maybe (not that most people use their ISP-provided email)?
So, at least AFAICT, all your proposal does is relegate the "ISP" to providing billing services and wholesale peering. Doesn't sound like much of an ISP to me.
Then explain to me the rationing that occurs in every nation with socialized health care?
Ahh, the good ol' "rationing" bogeyman. That lovely talking point of the right, cleverly phrased to bring back memories of food and water shortages. Much scarier than the more accurate word to describe this: triage.
Pro-tip: Unless you have a doctor, nurse, equipment, facilities, etc, for every single patient in the system, there will *always* be "rationing", no matter how the system is structured.
Seriously, get your head out of your ass. It's a nice, bright world outside the confines of your dark, dank colon.
Here's what I would do: cities and towns provide the infrastructure for the last mile. They connect fiber to homes, schools, and businesses and run it to a neighborhood hub. In rural areas, counties could build towers for 4G wireless. Then the big carriers would connect to the hubs (multiple carriers per hub for maximum competition) and charge for service.
Yeah, news flash: The last mile is the most expensive-to-operate part. It has the highest cost of initial rollout, has the greatest cost in maintenance and upgrades, etc.
In fact, I would contend that an ISP *is* the last mile. If you're not doing that, you're just a wholesale broadband provider offering peering arrangements. So what you're really saying is you want to do away with the private ISP.
That is one of the rules of government spending - it always costs more than stated.
Yeah, if you think corporations are any different, you need to climb out of your mom's basement and take a look at the real world.
You may or may not like big businesses but businesses are usually very good at reducing costs,
Right, and then pocketing the savings. I mean, look at all the deregulation that's happened over the last 20 years. That's totally saved the consumers money, right?
Yeah, or not.
the reason that isn't true with ISPs or cable companies is because they don't have any competition
No, the reason is because they are natural monopolies with very high barriers of entry.
But don't let sound economic theory get in the way of your blind ideology.
I don't know why so many people - Republicans and Democrats and Independents - want the government to do more and spend more for us.
Because, believe it or not, markets break down sometimes! I know, this might just blow your little libertarian mind, but there does exist such a thing as a "market failure". Such failures occur when distorting forces exist, such as natural barriers of entry and so forth, which result in a breakdown in competition. Broadband is such a market, just as any utility is, thanks to the exhorbitantly high cost of infrastructure deployment (one need only look at FIOS to see why broadband competition in the large is utterly absurd... it's literally cost them *billions* to roll out that program... no small business would ever be able to compete in that market).
But, hey, don't let me get in the way of your little religion, there. I'm sure you have great faith that your god, the invisible hand, will swoop down and save all the true believers. Meanwhile, the rest of us who live in the real world understand that markets aren't perfect, and sometimes government intervention is necessary.
So the text has been out for several hours and this guy flipped through it (you can't honestly read 357 pages of children's fiction in that time, let alone government policy) enough to find a few stated ideas for taxes, and all of a sudden it's a net loss for consumers?
Correct! See, you must remember, the FCC is obviously run by pinko communists. Plus, this is Slashdot, home of the knee-jerk nerd who, when he isn't jacking off to pictures of ESR posing with his handguns, is whining about government taxation and intervention into markets... until, of course, it's Microsoft or some other big baddy, at which point the government must step in and protect their pasty little asses.
And again, as per the medical/cultural debate, male circumcision is a medical procedure performed for cultural reasons. Female genital mutilation is a cultural procedure performed for cultural reasons.
And I'm saying there is absolutely no basis for making that distinction. What makes male circumcision a "medical procedure" and female genital mutiluation a "cultural procedure"? Neither affords any medical benefit whatsoever. In both case people have tried to post-justify the procedure on medical grounds, and in both cases the arguments have been found baseless. There is literally no difference between the two procedures, save that one is performed on a penis, and the other performed on a vagina.
Well, of course, one is routinely performed in the western, judeo-christian-influenced world while the other isn't.
They were in the wrong and they lost about half of their followers because of it. The church is not infallible, God is infallible.
Two words for you: Papal infallibility.:)
Nevertheless, this isn't the point. But by the OPs definition, the Church, in those days, was little more than a cult based around the teachings of Jesus. I'm just curious if he/she agrees with that.
I wasn't talking about culture at all there, I was talking about medical practice.
Now you're just mincing words. A medical practice is one where there's a medical justification for the procedure. However, in the case of male circumcision, there is virtually no evidence that it provides any medical benefit whatsoever, aside from a tiny decrease in the already tiny incident rates for male urinary tract infections. As such, if you're gonna try and whitewash this "procedure", at best it could be described as a cosmetic one. But it's a procedure that's performed for cultural, not medical, reasons.
However, I still can not rightly classify it as 'mutilation' because it is an elective out-patient procedure.
Bullshit! Since when has an infant been able to give their consent for this "elective out-patient procedure"? The very definition of "elective" is that there's a choice involved, which is clearly not the case for male or female genital cutting.
Again, in this case it is a routine cultural practice, not a routine medical practice. See above.
All the supposed medical benefits for circumcision, which have largely been debunked, have been attempts to post-justify a procedure that's fundamentally rooted in judeo-christian tradition, nothing more. As such, male circumcision is no more of a "medical practice" than female circumcision, and absolutely qualifies as a "cultural practice".
GP's argument about tradition is a pretty poor reason, but the infection bit is a valid point.
No, it's really not. Studies have shown that while male circumcision does reduce incidents of urinary tract infection, the absolute rates of such infections is vanishingly small, and thus the procedure can't be justified on those grounds. We're talking about cutting incident rates from something like 2% to 1% (BTW, those are invented numbers, I believe actual incident rates are lower than that, but I'm too lazy to find specific statistics).
Slashdot Mirror
Talk to high school teachers and college professors. Some of the kids *are* writing as poorly in school as they are on the internet.
I wrote that, and you completely missed my point. So let me explain it to you: The point is that some kids (and adults) have *always* had poor writing skills, and that the internet has done nothing to make the situation worse, and has, in fact, *improved* literacy among todays youth.
IMO, "It's informal!" is just a variant of the timeless string of excuses given for not actually knowing how to do it right.
Oh please, that's bullshit. When I'm speaking to a friend over the phone, I speak in a colloquial style. The same is true of writing, and always has been.
Yeah, informal standards are relaxed, but seriously, no one flips back and forth between decent writing style and horrible txt-speak.
They don't? I suppose you have studies that demonstrate this? You aren't just, you know, making arbitrary shit up to support your point, are you?
Seriously, get over yourself. Todays kids are fine.
If that's the case then they probably need lessons in presentation & giving a good impression from their parents & teachers
What part of "informal forum" don't you understand? Unless you have proof that these kids are habitually breaking grammar and spelling rules in *formal* communications, you complaints are baseless.
Not to mention the fact that these kids will need to apply for jobs some day and I doubt they'll get very far if they use the same sloppiness in their CVs/resumes.
And you assume they'll do this because...? Oh, right, because you're already biased to assume the current generation are a crop of idiots.
And, and as an aside, is it *really* so hard to type out the word "and"? Ignoring the fact that your entire first paragraph is a convoluted run-on sentence...
Huh, no kidding... well, gotta love Slashdot, home of the incredibly obscure factoid. :)
No more than "seahorse" (reindeer != deer). :)
However, what really shocks me is the level of their language and grammar skills.
Evidentally you've never read the average high school English essay. Guess what? Most people, no matter the generation, have rather poor writing skills. Doubly so on an informal forum where spelling and grammar aren't considered important.
Seriously, get over it. Today's youths are probably *more* literate than any previous generation, specifically because they spend so much time on the internet.
My youngest son has learning difficulties and we've put in a lot of work to get him to the stage that he can learn at a normal school. it's an autism spectrum issue.
Uhuh. So, let me get this straight: Your little anecdotal experience with your mildly autistic child somehow refutes this study.
Right. Sure.
If John Carmack can write a javascript
Totally OT, I know, but just FYI, you don't write "a javascript". It's not "java script", it's javascript. After all, I don't "write a python" or "a perl", do I? No. I write a "python script" or a "perl script". So yes, the correct phrasing is "a javascript script", which sounds a little ridiculous, but is nevertheless correct. Or you could use the less clumsy "a javascript program" or "a javascript application". Or you could rephrase it as "If John Carmack can write software to control thrust for a vertical takeoff rocket in javascript". But please, not "a javascript". It just sounds silly.
Now now, to be fair... he could just be married.
I rather suspect they decided to not do that *right now* for political reasons.
That's what I said. I don't give a crap if, in some hypothetical future, the Firefox devs suddenly realize that maybe user needs should actually trump ridiculous political posturing. The point is that now, today, there is a perfectly valid, legal, reasonable solution for supporting *any* codec in an HTML5 video element (well, any codec supported by gstreamer), but they're choosing not to implement it for strictly ideological reasons.
Right now they have nothing to worry about (except maybe inconveniencing some foul-mouthed slashdot poster that can't be bothered to search for solutions, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/83149/ ).
Uh, that's not a solution. Hell, did you even read the description of the addon? All it does is s/<video>/<embed>/. That's it. You lose all the integrated DOM support, video overlays, and all the other crap that makes the video element superior to straight object embedding.
*now* is the right time to make a stand and raise awareness about how detrimental patents are to free software.
Please, that's garbage. The battle is lost. It's been lost ever since Flash moved to H.264, and probably long before then. This little fight Firefox is putting up is pointless, and in the end, it's the users that will lose out.
Why the hell doesn't anyone understand this?
Because it's false.
Firefox needs only to ship with generic gstreamer support for it's video element, just as Fennec will be doing. Then you can install any damn gstreamer codec implementation you want, and it'll be available to Firefox. Problem is, the Firefox devs decided they don't want to do that for political reasons, and so Fennec's implementation won't be ported to Firefox. Thank you asshole developers!
Of course! Government regulation and hippies, the scapegoat for Slashdotters the world over! What didn't *I* think of that??
In my country, I can choose at least four different ISPs that serve my house, with multiple offers (ADSL, Cable and now optical fiber).
No, if I had to bet, you have two, or maybe three real ISPs: a telecom with ADSL infrastructure, a cable operator with coaxial infrastructure, and now a fibre operator, who may in fact be one of the other two, unless you're really lucky (like someone who lives in an area where Verizon FiOS is deployed).
See, if you actually wanted to deploy a *real* ISP, you would have to lay out millions if not billions of dollars to lay new cable. And that's an obvious, massive barrier to entry into the market... after all, last I checked, your average local ISP didn't have the money to lay new copper.
Of course, these supposed "ISPs" could lease the network from an existing competitor, but that requires government regulation mandating the operator do so, which isn't very "free-marketey", now is it? Of course, that's because the government needs to step in to correct a market distortion as a result of ISPs being a *natural monopoly* due to those aforementioned barriers to entry.
Command and control economies lead to scarcity, a fact born out repeatedly in history.
The fact that you can't see a difference between "command and control economies" and modern single-payer healthcare speaks volumes about the level of your intellect (though, to be fair, it's probably typical for a libertarian).
Ah, I see. So since you can't reason effectively, you just change the subject.
"HTA" is not rationing. Furthermore, "HTA" *exactly* the same thing that insurance companies in the US already do today: examine treatment options with the goal of optimizing the cost-benefit ratio.
Okay, that's not strictly true. Insurance companies couldn't care less about the benefit, so long as it reduces cost.
And as an aside, availability of drugs is not an indicator of quality of care. Furthermore, while a wider variety of drugs may be *sold* in the US, that says absolutely nothing about actual availability on the ground.
And no, I don't plan to read the rest of your little think-tank article. Organizations such as those are nothing more than shills for big business, and I have better things to do than examine their corporate-funded musings.
Still a need for high availability service
That would have to be provided by the last-mile provider, aka the municipality.
billing
So, sure, a corporation can do the paperwork and add overhead. Woo.
support
Again, last-mile activity. That's the city's job, remember?
home installation of equipment
*Also* a last-mile activity. Do you even remember what you proposed?
value add services
But ISPs don't need to provide services. That's why we *have* an internet. So we can access services. Hell, what do ISPs provide, today? Email, maybe (not that most people use their ISP-provided email)?
So, at least AFAICT, all your proposal does is relegate the "ISP" to providing billing services and wholesale peering. Doesn't sound like much of an ISP to me.
Then explain to me the rationing that occurs in every nation with socialized health care?
Ahh, the good ol' "rationing" bogeyman. That lovely talking point of the right, cleverly phrased to bring back memories of food and water shortages. Much scarier than the more accurate word to describe this: triage.
Pro-tip: Unless you have a doctor, nurse, equipment, facilities, etc, for every single patient in the system, there will *always* be "rationing", no matter how the system is structured.
Seriously, get your head out of your ass. It's a nice, bright world outside the confines of your dark, dank colon.
Here's what I would do: cities and towns provide the infrastructure for the last mile. They connect fiber to homes, schools, and businesses and run it to a neighborhood hub. In rural areas, counties could build towers for 4G wireless. Then the big carriers would connect to the hubs (multiple carriers per hub for maximum competition) and charge for service.
Yeah, news flash: The last mile is the most expensive-to-operate part. It has the highest cost of initial rollout, has the greatest cost in maintenance and upgrades, etc.
In fact, I would contend that an ISP *is* the last mile. If you're not doing that, you're just a wholesale broadband provider offering peering arrangements. So what you're really saying is you want to do away with the private ISP.
That is one of the rules of government spending - it always costs more than stated.
Yeah, if you think corporations are any different, you need to climb out of your mom's basement and take a look at the real world.
You may or may not like big businesses but businesses are usually very good at reducing costs,
Right, and then pocketing the savings. I mean, look at all the deregulation that's happened over the last 20 years. That's totally saved the consumers money, right?
Yeah, or not.
the reason that isn't true with ISPs or cable companies is because they don't have any competition
No, the reason is because they are natural monopolies with very high barriers of entry.
But don't let sound economic theory get in the way of your blind ideology.
I don't know why so many people - Republicans and Democrats and Independents - want the government to do more and spend more for us.
Because, believe it or not, markets break down sometimes! I know, this might just blow your little libertarian mind, but there does exist such a thing as a "market failure". Such failures occur when distorting forces exist, such as natural barriers of entry and so forth, which result in a breakdown in competition. Broadband is such a market, just as any utility is, thanks to the exhorbitantly high cost of infrastructure deployment (one need only look at FIOS to see why broadband competition in the large is utterly absurd... it's literally cost them *billions* to roll out that program... no small business would ever be able to compete in that market).
But, hey, don't let me get in the way of your little religion, there. I'm sure you have great faith that your god, the invisible hand, will swoop down and save all the true believers. Meanwhile, the rest of us who live in the real world understand that markets aren't perfect, and sometimes government intervention is necessary.
So the text has been out for several hours and this guy flipped through it (you can't honestly read 357 pages of children's fiction in that time, let alone government policy) enough to find a few stated ideas for taxes, and all of a sudden it's a net loss for consumers?
Correct! See, you must remember, the FCC is obviously run by pinko communists. Plus, this is Slashdot, home of the knee-jerk nerd who, when he isn't jacking off to pictures of ESR posing with his handguns, is whining about government taxation and intervention into markets... until, of course, it's Microsoft or some other big baddy, at which point the government must step in and protect their pasty little asses.
Eeeep... "figures into"...
I'm guessing that the CPU limits are generous and are more about filtering out bad algorithms than bad languages.
Unless, of course, running time features into the scoring...
And again, as per the medical/cultural debate, male circumcision is a medical procedure performed for cultural reasons. Female genital mutilation is a cultural procedure performed for cultural reasons.
And I'm saying there is absolutely no basis for making that distinction. What makes male circumcision a "medical procedure" and female genital mutiluation a "cultural procedure"? Neither affords any medical benefit whatsoever. In both case people have tried to post-justify the procedure on medical grounds, and in both cases the arguments have been found baseless. There is literally no difference between the two procedures, save that one is performed on a penis, and the other performed on a vagina.
Well, of course, one is routinely performed in the western, judeo-christian-influenced world while the other isn't.
They were in the wrong and they lost about half of their followers because of it. The church is not infallible, God is infallible.
Two words for you: Papal infallibility. :)
Nevertheless, this isn't the point. But by the OPs definition, the Church, in those days, was little more than a cult based around the teachings of Jesus. I'm just curious if he/she agrees with that.
I wasn't talking about culture at all there, I was talking about medical practice.
Now you're just mincing words. A medical practice is one where there's a medical justification for the procedure. However, in the case of male circumcision, there is virtually no evidence that it provides any medical benefit whatsoever, aside from a tiny decrease in the already tiny incident rates for male urinary tract infections. As such, if you're gonna try and whitewash this "procedure", at best it could be described as a cosmetic one. But it's a procedure that's performed for cultural, not medical, reasons.
However, I still can not rightly classify it as 'mutilation' because it is an elective out-patient procedure.
Bullshit! Since when has an infant been able to give their consent for this "elective out-patient procedure"? The very definition of "elective" is that there's a choice involved, which is clearly not the case for male or female genital cutting.
Again, in this case it is a routine cultural practice, not a routine medical practice. See above.
All the supposed medical benefits for circumcision, which have largely been debunked, have been attempts to post-justify a procedure that's fundamentally rooted in judeo-christian tradition, nothing more. As such, male circumcision is no more of a "medical practice" than female circumcision, and absolutely qualifies as a "cultural practice".
GP's argument about tradition is a pretty poor reason, but the infection bit is a valid point.
No, it's really not. Studies have shown that while male circumcision does reduce incidents of urinary tract infection, the absolute rates of such infections is vanishingly small, and thus the procedure can't be justified on those grounds. We're talking about cutting incident rates from something like 2% to 1% (BTW, those are invented numbers, I believe actual incident rates are lower than that, but I'm too lazy to find specific statistics).