All we have to do is be sure to put our best and brightest scientists/generals/politicians into deep mineshafts. After the dust clouds settle, they can re-emerge and re-populate the Earth. It would take about 100 years for this seed population to expand and re-build civilization to it's current level. Remember, the dust clouds would choke out human life, but the factories, mines, and machinery would still exist and be able to be pressed back into service.
Of course for such a small number of humans to seed an entire planet, there would have to be an abnormally high ratio of females to males. After all, a male can impregnate a woman every day, but a female can only be impregnated once a year or so. In order to establish a decent genetic balance(prevent inbreeding) we would need say, ten females to every male.
Unfortunately this means abandoning monogamy, for the men at least. A regrettable loss, but necessary.
Now, they start moving on to the negative points of OSS. Not that I don't think OSS has it's problems. In some of these places I think microsoft may have some points - but they often exaggerate them or extend them to places where I don't think they are applicable.
Of course, it's their new strategy when dealing with competition. Exaggerate, Extend, Extinguish. Sound familiar?
How many shares do you have of MSFT? 100? 1000? Hah! I wipe my ass with that many shares every morning. Let's face it, your total holdings in MSFT amount to basically dick. But I'm going to answer you anyway, just because I'm in that kind of mood.
1000 shares of MSFT stock = dick;
[Bill] wipes his ass with 1000 shares each morning;
Anyone who doesn't think code can be art should look at the JAPH archive on CPAN Beautiful stuff there. Functional, meaningful(as long as you have the requisite knowledge to understand it) and beautiful.
As other posters in this thread have pointed out, using DeCSS to rip a DVD and then allowing others to access that digital copy without encryption is the "threat" of DeCSS.
Stamping large numbers of copies has to be done with big, expensive equipment. It has to be done with supplies of blanks. It will have a central distribution point that the private investigators working for the *AAs can track down. The RIAA isn't scared of "commercial" pirates. Neither is the MPAA. The person they are scared of is Joe Sixpack. Joe won't make lots of copies, and Joe won't sell those copies for money, but Joe won't buy those movies from Best Buy either. And there are a lot of Joe Sixpacks in this world.
Look, this is a very simple case. All these analogies and arguements fall flat once simple definitions are made.
Definition 1. CSS
CSS is an key-based encryption technology. Movie studios "own" the keys and "lisence" them to DVD player manufacturers of their choice. It is not possible to view a DVD encrypted with CSS without one of these keys built into your DVD player or without a software program to decrypt the video with a key.
Definition 2. DE-CSS
DeCSS is a software program which can decrypt a CSS encoded video. A valid key must be provided to DeCSS for it to work.
That's it. Those are the definitions. Much simpler than any that are being used in court I bet. Now, viewed like this, with no connotations attached to either definition, what is wrong with DeCSS?
I have a program on my PC which does the exact same thing DeCSS does. It's called a software DVD player(Zoran SoftDVD if you must know) and it works with my DVD-ROM drive to let me and my family watch DVDs. That's all DeCSS does, but it allows people who didn't purchase a "lisence" for a key to decrypt DVDs. DeCSS allows USE of the material on a DVD. It allows legal as well as illegal use. If weapons manufacturers aren't held responsible for crimes committed with their weapons, why would the people who wrote/provide DeCSS be responsible for piracy?
Where this could really shine would be at a amusement park. Analyzing the emotions of both people on rides as well as getting off of rides would really help give you a more direct picture of how fun, scary, or boring your park is.
That and it would be hilarious to laugh my ass off at all the cypherpunks who deliberately go to the park so they can "stick it to the man" by shaking like a leaf after coming out of the kiddie area and holding rock steady and yawning after the house of horrors. Cypherpunks are funnier than the crack smoking marketing drones who try this stuff.
of course! It could cause a galactic crisis. I saw a movie about it once. I think they finally found their marbles at the end though.(well, except for that one guy who ended up losing, albeit voluntarially, 30 years worth of marbles)
Everyone with an IQ above 120, please report to either the lobotomy room or the courtroom.
SHHHH!! Don't give them any ideas! And certainly don't tell them that if they lobotomize everyone with an IQ over 120 that they'll gain that many more Britney Spears fans. That would probably really push them over the edge. Striking a blow against "piracy" and growing their fan base, they wouldn't be able to resist!
Most porn sites work this way. That is why you see more and more embedded "logos" and tags in the images on porn sites now. Someone would buy a membership for a month(or crack a password), download every damn thing on the site, publish it on usenet and BAM! All of a sudden you have no content that the "free" sites don't. Forget Sony, Lars Ulrich and the RIAA. Pretty damn soon we're going to have Jenna Jameson coming(going?) down on Congress to pass stricter IP laws so she can keep silly free sites from "pirating" her pics from her "official" site.
Not necessarily in front of the
cameras, however, but read those contracts carefully.
So would it be worse to be in front of the camera and get laid regularly, or would it be worse to be in the server room all day putting together websites with highly erotic content and never getting any?
I'm not sure if Timothy's comment meant we should be looking for contracts with on-camera time, or if he meant we should beware lest they suck us incredibly virile and physically attractive geeks into the horrid world of *GASP* Adult Entertainment.
Only the first time. You checksum it. Next time, you ask for the current checksum. If it differs from yours, request the page.
IIRC, Apache has this kind of functionality. It can return checksums of pages instead of headers. The real question is, is bandwidth more important than server time. Obviously bandwidth is phenomenally important, it's what we get charged for by the telco. Thinking ahead to when many user agents have this kind of functionality and more web servers have the ability to return checksums, headers, or the full page(as well as other stuff of course), I think this will get more and more important. Servers will be asked to do all kinds of manipulation on their data before they are even asked to serve any of it. This will take the load off the bandwidth of the communications pipes, and put it on the system busses and hardware of the server. Better, faster.
...school is important for learning how to deal with other people. Every home schooled person I've come across (warning! sample size of one!) has had problems interacting with people.
I'd guess that the home-schooler you know was home-schooled somewhere in the early eighties or close to that. Even moreso, I wouldn't be suprised if the reason their parents chose to teach them at home was not religious. At that time, there were few home-schoolers and there was almost no infrastructure to support/advocate home-schooling. The primary reasons people taught at home was so they could give their children a "moral" upbringing. Since there was lack of decent, integrated and tested cirriculum, and because they were actively trying to make the kids different, of course there were social mismatches.
Since that time, home-schooling has advanced tremendously. There are now complete cirriculums, lesson plans, textbooks, recommended schedules, test banks, etc, geared towards the home-based school. These cirriculums are mostly tied to some religion, but there are some secular offerings as well. Because of the generation of home-school social outcasts, like your sample, there has been a growth of people who pay attention to the social development of people who are taught at home. You'll often find several families getting together for field trips(my family did this in the early 80's, possibly why we weren't like most home-schoolers. Maybe it was because we had a large family and had several kids at home all the time and weren't alone in our classroom with Mom and Dad), or co-operative study sessions.
We'll probably home-school our kids, even though we kind of like the school in our area. But, we know now what our parents didn't know then. We can't force the kids out of social situations based on religion or the method of their education. My wife and I take our children on field trips weekly. We have a weekly playgroup, a monthly le Leche League meeting, and a weekly Spanish lesson taught by a friend. We're members of a few of the local museums including The Science Place. We take them there regularly and let them learn about physics/art/science/culture. I have a job which allows me flex time so I can take an extra hour or so at home in the mornings if I feel like playing with the kids before I go to work, or take off early if I feel like going home and doing something with them. We went to the library last night and checked out a couple dozen books, each child picked out five books. We read to them daily and nightly.
It's often said that the failures of our school system are the failures of our parents. That is doubly true for home-schooled children. If your friend is not social, it's because his parents didn't teach him to be social, not because he learned while sitting in a home instead of a citizen/consumer factory.
One of my favorite exchanges happened in this thread, I'm re-posting it here because it was partly between ACs and I'd like it to get archived.
they do not have constant social interaction outside of the home
Translation: They don't have years of experience dealing with idiots, buttheads, bullies, egomaniacs.... and those would just be the school teachers.:-)
Take a kid who is already "different" and feeling pressured and maybe abused by his peers, and realise that part of the pressure in a teen's life is living up to mommy and daddy's expectations. Now put that child in a situation where he NEVER has a chance to just "be a kid" because 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, his parents are looking over his shoulder, and therefore he feels like he has to live up to his parents' invariably-unrealistic and often overly-perfectionist expectations. And the kid can't do anything about it, because he's even more powerless against parental expectations than he is against peer abuse.
Maybe that's why EVERY home-schooled kid I know has either had a breakdown, or has come real close to it. Home schooling is a bandaid solution that ultimately just makes matters worse.
I wish you had posted the sample size. I find it hard to believe you know very many home-schooled kids. I was homeschooled until high school(my parents didn't have college educations so they didn't feel comfortable teaching us high school subject matter). I never had anything resembling a breakdown until I ran into an overly-strict coach in high school. One day other guys at my table made a mess with M&M's all over the floor and the coach was going to make me stay after lunch with them and help clean up. I refused and he tried to take me to the office over it, I refused and we almost came to blows over it.
If you know a bunch of people who have cracked under unrealistic parental expectations, don't blame home-schooling for that. It was the parents with unrealistic expectations. They might have been even worse if the kids had gone to public school. If little Billy had come home with less than straight A's or missed the honor roll one semester, they would have freaked too. My parents believed in individual study as well as supervised study. We were in the "classroom" from about 8 AM to around noon then we had free time/chores. I think you'll find that overly strict/demanding/unrealistic parents fuck up their kids no matter where they go to school.
What should be done is, parents of both the kids should get together along with the kids to work out the differences. Parents who leave the system to "raise" their children as well as teach them, are just as much to blame as the kids are.
I'm not sure I'm willing to let my kids go through the turmoil sure to follow any real reform of the educational system. I'll take them out and teach them at home before I'd let them be part of a system which was re-inventing itself. They're too valuable to me to let them be guinea pigs for a system which has proven itself to be abusive and cruel in it's worst form and uncaring/incompetent in it's best.
Steven
attending a kindergarten round-up. Essentially they invite the parents and children to the school and show them the facilities, meet the staff, and have a Q&A session. I shadowed my daughter as she went to a classroom and participated in a few of the activities she would do as a kindergartner.
One of the things that we were sure we asked is if they allow impromptu visits from parents. They said, "Definitely! We encourage our parents to drop by any time. We'll be happy to have you come to lunch, sit in on a class, anything." There were a lot of things about the school we looked at that I liked, but we're still not sure about sending our daughter to public school at all. Even with good teachers and good schools, the education process in America breeds out curiosity and individuality. I sat in with the soon-to-be kindergartners and there were a couple who were happily still coloring their hand puppet when it was time for "storytime" These children were, politely, forced to come sit down "on the carpet" and listen to the story and then participate in a sing-a-long. I don't want to paint too negative a picture here, the teacher talked gently to the child and offered to sit with her if she would come to the carpet. That was a plus, but there was one child who was visibly scared and didn't want to participate at all. She wasn't getting any attention at all, she was holding her hand in her mouth and crying. I called out to her and held her in my lap and let her sit with me during storytime. Perhaps so many unfamiliar children crowded around her on the carpet scared her, I don't know. She seemed to adjust and I put her down to re-join the group.
My wife and I are seriously considering Home-Schooling, and living in Texas(this is a general comment on the article) is wonderful for the home-schooler. Texas has some of the most lenient laws for home-schooling. All we have to do is register our desire to home-school, meet a few very basic requirements as to cirriculum(we have to teach citizenship and american history, but that's about it) and we're set. In some states you have to be a certified teacher before they'll let you home-school. I was home-schooled and I think it was much better for me to be in a loving/dedicated home environment, than a factorylike building dedicated to assembly-line citizen/consumer producing.
I would love to see videotaping in schools. I've never even considered taking my children anywhere(daycare when we were in college, and now, possibly, school) where there wasn't an open invitation to parents to check in at any time. More and more schools/daycares are beginning to understand parent's concern with non-visitation policies. And more and more parents are beginning to demand open visitation policies. There is a local grocery store with a supervised play area for the children while the parents shop. It has CCTV piped from there to a couple dozen monitors spread through the store so we can keep an eye on what's going on with the children at any time. We prefer that store, even though it has higher prices a fair bit of the time and is further from the house than about three other stores.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with other posters who said the potential embarassment to the faculty will probably keep video cameras out of schools, or at least video cameras the public could look at. I went to a college which is famous for producing quality teachers, it's as famous/reputable among teaching circles as Harvard is among business/law circles. I can spot a good teacher a mile away, and I can tell you, there aren't very many in public schools. Partly it's the low wages, partly it's the emphasis on standardized tests and the beaurocratic BS(good teachers love freedom from paperwork and rigamorale as much as geeks) and partly it's the fear of having to deal with unruly students who want nothing but social promotions and have no love for the subject the teacher feels so passionately about. It's hard to constantly throw your pearls before swine, so I can't blame them there.
Ah yes, and what happens when they open the briefcase and see the post-it note with the encryption key is stuck on top of the laptop? What they're looking for is a foolproof way of protecting their information. Encryption is only as secure as the protection provided to(not by) the key.
That's true. Even though the first time I read the Onion it wasn't on a friend's recommendation or anything, I just stumbled across it when I was doing some research on something. Man, it made my eyes cross for a while.
You think we'll stop demonizing politicians for cheating when we see our own spouses cheating? Or will we take a copy of that video to court in order to win a favorable divorce settlement?
And we'll take a couple months to research the judge to be sure we pick one which will rule in our favor. You know, the guy who has never been seen with another woman himself and who has a history of settling cases like this one in favor of the person who was cheated on. A "Transparent Society" turns us all into extortionists and blackmailers. We see how well this works already with the WIPO and the cases over domain name disuptes. The plantiffs are allowed to pick the judge and they pick the one which is sympathetic to their case.
Mass spying is bad enough, but automate it and let people have a computer tabulate certain events... That's a sure recipe for a totalitarian state where everyone follows the strictest people's morality for fear of being labelled a pervert or deviant and ostracized.
Either that or everyone sinks to the lowest denominator. So we can either be a world of fake goody-goody's or we'll all become evildoers because the repercussions are lessened due to widespread tolerance which is due to everyone seeing all the colors of society and all the shades of grey.
Recently, a federal judge in New York ruled that the magazine was guilty of copyright infringement for posting on its Web site some computer code that allows people to copy encrypted DVD movies. The magazine's editor, Eric Corley, aka Emmanuel Goldstein, has said that the publication of the program is protected by the First Amendment and is appealing.
DeCSS doesn't allow people to copy DVDs. That's always been possible, provided you can get a blank DVD and a DVD burner which aren't crippled with access controls. DeCSS allows people to use DVDs in non-approved, or non-licsened equipment.
There is a big difference, especially with the draconian restrictions placed on "approved" equipment manufacturers. I don't see why CSS is considered anything other than what it is, a way of making artificial trade barriers.
Oh, now I remember, it's because the mega-corps say it's an copy control mechanism. They're famous for their honesty to the consumer.
Wow, they're more brilliant than I thought! They can hack into the New York Times and make a front-page story come out in the Washington Post! As much as I appreciate their cleverness, what's to stop them from hacking into the NYTimes and changing the numbers in my bank account? If they can do this, they can do anything! It'll be anarchy! We won't be able to believe anything we read. It'll be like turning every newspaper, however reputable, into the Onion. Gasp! Won't somebody please think of the children?
Steven
That's really quite scary
on
AI Movie Promo
·
· Score: 1
Of course we'll just have to wait and see, but I'm not looking forward to this. Just like other movies dealing with a potentially world-altering technology, i.e. genetic manipulation, this movie has the potential to seriously affect popular viewpoints of AI technology. With a field as wide-open as AI still is, meaning we still don't know how the first truly conscious AI will react, I have real misgivings about any movie about the subject. Especially one which is a drama and intended to entertain. The odds of it being realistic are pretty slim.
The Terminator series really colored popular opinion about AI. How could Spielberg hope to present a realistic picture of a subject even the leading experts in the field are unsure of? After viewing the trailer it looks like Pinnochio remade, but I still find it scary.
Slashdot Mirror
All we have to do is be sure to put our best and brightest scientists/generals/politicians into deep mineshafts. After the dust clouds settle, they can re-emerge and re-populate the Earth. It would take about 100 years for this seed population to expand and re-build civilization to it's current level. Remember, the dust clouds would choke out human life, but the factories, mines, and machinery would still exist and be able to be pressed back into service.
Of course for such a small number of humans to seed an entire planet, there would have to be an abnormally high ratio of females to males. After all, a male can impregnate a woman every day, but a female can only be impregnated once a year or so. In order to establish a decent genetic balance(prevent inbreeding) we would need say, ten females to every male.
Unfortunately this means abandoning monogamy, for the men at least. A regrettable loss, but necessary.
Or maybe I should stop watching so many movies.
Steven
Now, they start moving on to the negative points of OSS. Not that I don't think OSS has it's problems. In some of these places I think microsoft may have some points - but they often exaggerate them or extend them to places where I don't think they are applicable.
Of course, it's their new strategy when dealing with competition. Exaggerate, Extend, Extinguish. Sound familiar?
Steven
How many shares do you have of MSFT? 100? 1000? Hah! I wipe my ass with that many shares every morning. Let's face it, your total holdings in MSFT amount to basically dick. But I'm going to answer you anyway, just because I'm in that kind of mood.
1000 shares of MSFT stock = dick;
[Bill] wipes his ass with 1000 shares each morning;
[Bill] wipes his ass with dick each morning;
Hmm
Steven
Anyone who doesn't think code can be art should look at the JAPH archive on CPAN Beautiful stuff there. Functional, meaningful(as long as you have the requisite knowledge to understand it) and beautiful.
Steven
As other posters in this thread have pointed out, using DeCSS to rip a DVD and then allowing others to access that digital copy without encryption is the "threat" of DeCSS.
Stamping large numbers of copies has to be done with big, expensive equipment. It has to be done with supplies of blanks. It will have a central distribution point that the private investigators working for the *AAs can track down. The RIAA isn't scared of "commercial" pirates. Neither is the MPAA. The person they are scared of is Joe Sixpack. Joe won't make lots of copies, and Joe won't sell those copies for money, but Joe won't buy those movies from Best Buy either. And there are a lot of Joe Sixpacks in this world.
Steven
Look, this is a very simple case. All these analogies and arguements fall flat once simple definitions are made.
Definition 1. CSS
CSS is an key-based encryption technology. Movie studios "own" the keys and "lisence" them to DVD player manufacturers of their choice. It is not possible to view a DVD encrypted with CSS without one of these keys built into your DVD player or without a software program to decrypt the video with a key.
Definition 2. DE-CSS
DeCSS is a software program which can decrypt a CSS encoded video. A valid key must be provided to DeCSS for it to work.
That's it. Those are the definitions. Much simpler than any that are being used in court I bet. Now, viewed like this, with no connotations attached to either definition, what is wrong with DeCSS?
I have a program on my PC which does the exact same thing DeCSS does. It's called a software DVD player(Zoran SoftDVD if you must know) and it works with my DVD-ROM drive to let me and my family watch DVDs. That's all DeCSS does, but it allows people who didn't purchase a "lisence" for a key to decrypt DVDs. DeCSS allows USE of the material on a DVD. It allows legal as well as illegal use. If weapons manufacturers aren't held responsible for crimes committed with their weapons, why would the people who wrote/provide DeCSS be responsible for piracy?
Steven
Where this could really shine would be at a amusement park. Analyzing the emotions of both people on rides as well as getting off of rides would really help give you a more direct picture of how fun, scary, or boring your park is.
That and it would be hilarious to laugh my ass off at all the cypherpunks who deliberately go to the park so they can "stick it to the man" by shaking like a leaf after coming out of the kiddie area and holding rock steady and yawning after the house of horrors. Cypherpunks are funnier than the crack smoking marketing drones who try this stuff.
Steven
of course! It could cause a galactic crisis. I saw a movie about it once. I think they finally found their marbles at the end though.(well, except for that one guy who ended up losing, albeit voluntarially, 30 years worth of marbles)
Steven
Everyone with an IQ above 120, please report to either the lobotomy room or the courtroom.
SHHHH!! Don't give them any ideas! And certainly don't tell them that if they lobotomize everyone with an IQ over 120 that they'll gain that many more Britney Spears fans. That would probably really push them over the edge. Striking a blow against "piracy" and growing their fan base, they wouldn't be able to resist!
Steven
Most porn sites work this way. That is why you see more and more embedded "logos" and tags in the images on porn sites now. Someone would buy a membership for a month(or crack a password), download every damn thing on the site, publish it on usenet and BAM! All of a sudden you have no content that the "free" sites don't. Forget Sony, Lars Ulrich and the RIAA. Pretty damn soon we're going to have Jenna Jameson coming(going?) down on Congress to pass stricter IP laws so she can keep silly free sites from "pirating" her pics from her "official" site.
Steven
It's because of David Hasselhoff's fantabulous acting abilities. Why else?
Steven
I only watch Baywatch for the opening sequence
Not necessarily in front of the
cameras, however, but read those contracts carefully.
So would it be worse to be in front of the camera and get laid regularly, or would it be worse to be in the server room all day putting together websites with highly erotic content and never getting any?
I'm not sure if Timothy's comment meant we should be looking for contracts with on-camera time, or if he meant we should beware lest they suck us incredibly virile and physically attractive geeks into the horrid world of *GASP* Adult Entertainment.
Steven
IIRC, Apache has this kind of functionality. It can return checksums of pages instead of headers. The real question is, is bandwidth more important than server time. Obviously bandwidth is phenomenally important, it's what we get charged for by the telco. Thinking ahead to when many user agents have this kind of functionality and more web servers have the ability to return checksums, headers, or the full page(as well as other stuff of course), I think this will get more and more important. Servers will be asked to do all kinds of manipulation on their data before they are even asked to serve any of it. This will take the load off the bandwidth of the communications pipes, and put it on the system busses and hardware of the server. Better, faster.
Steven
Gahh! Farking double negatives screwing me up. I could have sworn I wrote that as
"Even moreso, I would be suprised if the reason their parents chose to teach them at home was not religious."
I even previewed it beacuse I was worried about the double negative. I guess it just shows, it's time for me to go home.
Steven
I'd guess that the home-schooler you know was home-schooled somewhere in the early eighties or close to that. Even moreso, I wouldn't be suprised if the reason their parents chose to teach them at home was not religious. At that time, there were few home-schoolers and there was almost no infrastructure to support/advocate home-schooling. The primary reasons people taught at home was so they could give their children a "moral" upbringing. Since there was lack of decent, integrated and tested cirriculum, and because they were actively trying to make the kids different, of course there were social mismatches.
Since that time, home-schooling has advanced tremendously. There are now complete cirriculums, lesson plans, textbooks, recommended schedules, test banks, etc, geared towards the home-based school. These cirriculums are mostly tied to some religion, but there are some secular offerings as well. Because of the generation of home-school social outcasts, like your sample, there has been a growth of people who pay attention to the social development of people who are taught at home. You'll often find several families getting together for field trips(my family did this in the early 80's, possibly why we weren't like most home-schoolers. Maybe it was because we had a large family and had several kids at home all the time and weren't alone in our classroom with Mom and Dad), or co-operative study sessions.
We'll probably home-school our kids, even though we kind of like the school in our area. But, we know now what our parents didn't know then. We can't force the kids out of social situations based on religion or the method of their education. My wife and I take our children on field trips weekly. We have a weekly playgroup, a monthly le Leche League meeting, and a weekly Spanish lesson taught by a friend. We're members of a few of the local museums including The Science Place. We take them there regularly and let them learn about physics/art/science/culture. I have a job which allows me flex time so I can take an extra hour or so at home in the mornings if I feel like playing with the kids before I go to work, or take off early if I feel like going home and doing something with them. We went to the library last night and checked out a couple dozen books, each child picked out five books. We read to them daily and nightly.
It's often said that the failures of our school system are the failures of our parents. That is doubly true for home-schooled children. If your friend is not social, it's because his parents didn't teach him to be social, not because he learned while sitting in a home instead of a citizen/consumer factory.
One of my favorite exchanges happened in this thread, I'm re-posting it here because it was partly between ACs and I'd like it to get archived.
Steven
Take a kid who is already "different" and feeling pressured and maybe abused by his peers, and realise that part of the pressure in a teen's life is living up to mommy and daddy's expectations. Now put that child in a situation where he NEVER has a chance to just "be a kid" because 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, his parents are looking over his shoulder, and therefore he feels like he has to live up to his parents' invariably-unrealistic and often overly-perfectionist expectations. And the kid can't do anything about it, because he's even more powerless against parental expectations than he is against peer abuse.
Maybe that's why EVERY home-schooled kid I know has either had a breakdown, or has come real close to it. Home schooling is a bandaid solution that ultimately just makes matters worse.
I wish you had posted the sample size. I find it hard to believe you know very many home-schooled kids. I was homeschooled until high school(my parents didn't have college educations so they didn't feel comfortable teaching us high school subject matter). I never had anything resembling a breakdown until I ran into an overly-strict coach in high school. One day other guys at my table made a mess with M&M's all over the floor and the coach was going to make me stay after lunch with them and help clean up. I refused and he tried to take me to the office over it, I refused and we almost came to blows over it.
If you know a bunch of people who have cracked under unrealistic parental expectations, don't blame home-schooling for that. It was the parents with unrealistic expectations. They might have been even worse if the kids had gone to public school. If little Billy had come home with less than straight A's or missed the honor roll one semester, they would have freaked too. My parents believed in individual study as well as supervised study. We were in the "classroom" from about 8 AM to around noon then we had free time/chores. I think you'll find that overly strict/demanding/unrealistic parents fuck up their kids no matter where they go to school.
Steven
What should be done is, parents of both the kids should get together along with the kids to work out the differences. Parents who leave the system to "raise" their children as well as teach them, are just as much to blame as the kids are. I'm not sure I'm willing to let my kids go through the turmoil sure to follow any real reform of the educational system. I'll take them out and teach them at home before I'd let them be part of a system which was re-inventing itself. They're too valuable to me to let them be guinea pigs for a system which has proven itself to be abusive and cruel in it's worst form and uncaring/incompetent in it's best. Steven
attending a kindergarten round-up. Essentially they invite the parents and children to the school and show them the facilities, meet the staff, and have a Q&A session. I shadowed my daughter as she went to a classroom and participated in a few of the activities she would do as a kindergartner.
One of the things that we were sure we asked is if they allow impromptu visits from parents. They said, "Definitely! We encourage our parents to drop by any time. We'll be happy to have you come to lunch, sit in on a class, anything." There were a lot of things about the school we looked at that I liked, but we're still not sure about sending our daughter to public school at all. Even with good teachers and good schools, the education process in America breeds out curiosity and individuality. I sat in with the soon-to-be kindergartners and there were a couple who were happily still coloring their hand puppet when it was time for "storytime" These children were, politely, forced to come sit down "on the carpet" and listen to the story and then participate in a sing-a-long. I don't want to paint too negative a picture here, the teacher talked gently to the child and offered to sit with her if she would come to the carpet. That was a plus, but there was one child who was visibly scared and didn't want to participate at all. She wasn't getting any attention at all, she was holding her hand in her mouth and crying. I called out to her and held her in my lap and let her sit with me during storytime. Perhaps so many unfamiliar children crowded around her on the carpet scared her, I don't know. She seemed to adjust and I put her down to re-join the group.
My wife and I are seriously considering Home-Schooling, and living in Texas(this is a general comment on the article) is wonderful for the home-schooler. Texas has some of the most lenient laws for home-schooling. All we have to do is register our desire to home-school, meet a few very basic requirements as to cirriculum(we have to teach citizenship and american history, but that's about it) and we're set. In some states you have to be a certified teacher before they'll let you home-school. I was home-schooled and I think it was much better for me to be in a loving/dedicated home environment, than a factorylike building dedicated to assembly-line citizen/consumer producing.
I would love to see videotaping in schools. I've never even considered taking my children anywhere(daycare when we were in college, and now, possibly, school) where there wasn't an open invitation to parents to check in at any time. More and more schools/daycares are beginning to understand parent's concern with non-visitation policies. And more and more parents are beginning to demand open visitation policies. There is a local grocery store with a supervised play area for the children while the parents shop. It has CCTV piped from there to a couple dozen monitors spread through the store so we can keep an eye on what's going on with the children at any time. We prefer that store, even though it has higher prices a fair bit of the time and is further from the house than about three other stores.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with other posters who said the potential embarassment to the faculty will probably keep video cameras out of schools, or at least video cameras the public could look at. I went to a college which is famous for producing quality teachers, it's as famous/reputable among teaching circles as Harvard is among business/law circles. I can spot a good teacher a mile away, and I can tell you, there aren't very many in public schools. Partly it's the low wages, partly it's the emphasis on standardized tests and the beaurocratic BS(good teachers love freedom from paperwork and rigamorale as much as geeks) and partly it's the fear of having to deal with unruly students who want nothing but social promotions and have no love for the subject the teacher feels so passionately about. It's hard to constantly throw your pearls before swine, so I can't blame them there.
Steven
Egads that was hilarious! I wish I had mod points today.
Steven
Ah yes, and what happens when they open the briefcase and see the post-it note with the encryption key is stuck on top of the laptop? What they're looking for is a foolproof way of protecting their information. Encryption is only as secure as the protection provided to(not by) the key.
Steven
That's true. Even though the first time I read the Onion it wasn't on a friend's recommendation or anything, I just stumbled across it when I was doing some research on something. Man, it made my eyes cross for a while.
Steven
You think we'll stop demonizing politicians for cheating when we see our own spouses cheating? Or will we take a copy of that video to court in order to win a favorable divorce settlement?
And we'll take a couple months to research the judge to be sure we pick one which will rule in our favor. You know, the guy who has never been seen with another woman himself and who has a history of settling cases like this one in favor of the person who was cheated on. A "Transparent Society" turns us all into extortionists and blackmailers. We see how well this works already with the WIPO and the cases over domain name disuptes. The plantiffs are allowed to pick the judge and they pick the one which is sympathetic to their case.
Mass spying is bad enough, but automate it and let people have a computer tabulate certain events... That's a sure recipe for a totalitarian state where everyone follows the strictest people's morality for fear of being labelled a pervert or deviant and ostracized.
Either that or everyone sinks to the lowest denominator. So we can either be a world of fake goody-goody's or we'll all become evildoers because the repercussions are lessened due to widespread tolerance which is due to everyone seeing all the colors of society and all the shades of grey.
There is *no* freedom is constant surveilance.
Agreed.
Steven
Recently, a federal judge in New York ruled that the magazine was guilty of copyright infringement for posting on its Web site some computer code that allows people to copy encrypted DVD movies. The magazine's editor, Eric Corley, aka Emmanuel Goldstein, has said that the publication of the program is protected by the First Amendment and is appealing.
DeCSS doesn't allow people to copy DVDs. That's always been possible, provided you can get a blank DVD and a DVD burner which aren't crippled with access controls. DeCSS allows people to use DVDs in non-approved, or non-licsened equipment.
There is a big difference, especially with the draconian restrictions placed on "approved" equipment manufacturers. I don't see why CSS is considered anything other than what it is, a way of making artificial trade barriers.
Oh, now I remember, it's because the mega-corps say it's an copy control mechanism. They're famous for their honesty to the consumer.
Steven
Wow, they're more brilliant than I thought! They can hack into the New York Times and make a front-page story come out in the Washington Post! As much as I appreciate their cleverness, what's to stop them from hacking into the NYTimes and changing the numbers in my bank account? If they can do this, they can do anything! It'll be anarchy! We won't be able to believe anything we read. It'll be like turning every newspaper, however reputable, into the Onion. Gasp! Won't somebody please think of the children?
Steven
Of course we'll just have to wait and see, but I'm not looking forward to this. Just like other movies dealing with a potentially world-altering technology, i.e. genetic manipulation, this movie has the potential to seriously affect popular viewpoints of AI technology. With a field as wide-open as AI still is, meaning we still don't know how the first truly conscious AI will react, I have real misgivings about any movie about the subject. Especially one which is a drama and intended to entertain. The odds of it being realistic are pretty slim.
The Terminator series really colored popular opinion about AI. How could Spielberg hope to present a realistic picture of a subject even the leading experts in the field are unsure of? After viewing the trailer it looks like Pinnochio remade, but I still find it scary.
Steven