The Mythbusters tests this awhile back and couldn't replicate it at all. Now, I know they aren't "a scientific study", but they actually tried the best case scenarios and couldn't get it to work. You are more at risk if you set the pump up, go back into your car, get out of your car (thus building up a static charge), and then touch metal near the gas pump as it is being removed.
That's my options in a nutshell. For TV, I have Time Warner Cable or I can go with satellite (and be locked into a contract). Then again, we've been on the cusp of cutting the cord for years so this might be the move that pushes us over the edge.
For Internet, however, we have Time Warner Cable. There's also Verizon DSL, but they have shown time and time again that they want to ditch it ASAP. Dial-up or no Internet isn't an option. Neither is relying solely on my cell phone for data (too expensive). So I'm essentially locked into one choice for Internet service. If they decide to charge me $100 a month for a 1Gbps connection and a 10GB cap, I have no choice but to pay. (So long as they are less expensive than cellular data plans which isn't hard to do.)
I'd love to see their networks forced open. One company should run the network and sell access to companies who then offer service to customers. This would increase competition, decrease prices, decrease network neutrality concerns (because the network company wouldn't be "competing" against NetFlix, etc), and improve service. Sadly, cable ISPs don't want this and will fight tooth and nail (and lobbyist) to prevent this from happening.
What about her daughter who - according to the summary - is both a US citizen AND was denied entry as well. If I leave the country on business, are you saying I have no right to re-enter the country I have citizenship in if the government decides not to allow it? If so, the potential for abuse is incredible.
Most of the [UN] members are shitheads with far more restrictive speech laws than the US.
Exactly. The call for "control of the Internet" to go to the UN is really a call by some countries to outlaw anything online that they find offensive/inconvenient/annoying/etc. I can post a rant about President Obama using horrible language and even some claims that have been disproved a dozen times and I'm perfectly fine unless I make a threat on his life. In which case, expect a visit from the Secret Service as it is their job to protect the President's life. Even then, you might not be immediately arrested depending on their threat assessment. Do the same thing in China, for example, (criticize the leaders without threatening violence) and you might not be as lucky. Do it in North Korea and both you and your family will be very "unlucky." However, I - within the United States - can criticize the Saudi government all I want with no repercussions and they don't want this. If they had their way, this would be an offense worthy of extraditing me to their country over to stand trial. (Even if you had a decent chance of not being extradited, the threat along would be enough to quiet most people.) In other words, the Internet under UN control (and thus under these nations' influences) would become a draconian environment subject to the strictest laws of any land it might possibly reach.
Is the US perfect? Of course not. But these countries are far, far worse and letting them decide what should be legal or illegal online would be a huge mistake.
Copyright is automatic, you don't need to state it explicitly for it to apply. That's why downloading movies from TPB is perfectly legal but redistribution without permission is not.
Technically, downloading movies from The Pirate Bay without the copyright holder's permission isn't legal (at least in the US). It's just near-impossible to prosecute unless you are uploading as well (which some BitTorrent clients do). To prosecute an uploader, you just need to look for someone offering the file for download. (We'll set aside for the moment any discussion on whether an IP address is sufficient evidence for conviction since it's obviously enough for the RIAA/MPAA to get trials started in many cases.) To prosecute a downloader, you would need access to ISP and/or website logs to identify who connected to what resources when. The former can be obtained easily and can "take down" someone who is sharing a lot of files with a lot of people. The latter takes a lot of resources (from court cases to obtain the logs to going through the logs to identify infringements) and can only "take down" one person who is downloading files.
The original Napster case affirmed that downloading content wasn't permitted, but further court cases haven't clarified that much since prosecuting a downloader costs so much for so little "return." If a downloader is ever prosecuted, though, don't expect the courts to rule that downloading is perfectly legal.
Given how few merchants have even looked at the signature area of my card, the thief signing the card wouldn't impact whether or not the merchant accepted the thieve's signature as being valid.
Most times I don't even sign my cards. Yes, I know I'm supposed to, but I've gone for years without signing it. It always seemed odd to me to give a potential credit card thief a copy of my signature along with my card. Maybe once did someone even look for the signature and even then it was more of a "Oh, you didn't sign it" than a "We can't accept that card unsigned."
Just to add some more to the mix, NASA has some information on asteroid sizes ( http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/asteroidfact.html ). Let's assume we picked a small asteroid, Castalia, and mined that at 63 million kg per day. We'd "use it all up" in just over 21 years. (Again, this is assuming the "perfect case" of the asteroid being entirely made of materials we'd want. No waste products produced at all.) A larger asteroid like Ida would take us 4.3 million of years to use up. Remember, not only is space is really big, but many of the things that occupy it are really big as well!
I looked up some figures (http://www.infomine.com/minesite/) and found that some mines operate at 63,000 tonnes per day. Let's assume that Mine Base Moon ramps up to that level fairly quickly. The mass of the Moon is 7.34767309 × 10^22 kilograms. 63,000 tonnes = 63,000,000 kg. At this rate, it would take 1,166,297,315,873,016 days (or 3 trillion years) to use up the entire Moon. We'd be in greater risk of the Sun going red giant first.
Of course, we don't need to "use up" the Moon. Let's assume we just need to change the mass by 1/100% to make a difference. This means we only have 116,629,731,587 days or over 300 million years.
I don't think changing the Moon's gravity due to mining is something we need to worry about for quite some time.
Granted this isn't college, but New York state tackled "grade inflation" by giving students tests that weren't developmentally appropriate and based on curriculum they hadn't been taught. The result was that only about 30% of students passed. The bonus was that State Ed and the governor could then point to those tests as further proof that teachers are failing our students and 1) we need to have more of these tests to assess their performance and 2) teachers should be bound by EngageNY curriculum which literally reads like a script except that actors get more leeway in their roles. (It tells the teacher what to teach, for how long - in 10 minute segments - how to teach it, what questions to ask, what responses should be, etc. Why have a teacher when you can have a robot instead?)
I know that Microsoft still likes to think of itself as the 800lb gorilla that can just walk into any area it chooses and dominate, but in the eBook market, Microsoft is a mouse and Amazon is the 800lb gorilla. For better or worse, Amazon essentially *is* the eBook market. (Source - Amazon has 67% of the market. Next is Barnes & Noble with 11.8% and Apple with 8.2%.)
If Microsoft is going to win over eBook readers, they are going to need to offer something substantial to woo market share away from Amazon. I honestly don't see that happening and it's not like they can use Windows 8 as leverage the way they used to leverage Windows to prop up IE against other browsers. They'll probably launch this, it will languish in the market for a few years, and then it will be killed off.
Sure. Let's not shut down the horrible program that a ton of people oppose and instead hand the data over to a company to manage and keep secure. What's the worst that can happen?
Off the top of my head:
1 - Hackings. No database is secure. If anyone was to store the data securely (putting aside for the moment the question of whether they should have the data in the first place), I'd trust the NSA to do it over some random company. At the very least, this reduces the potential attack vectors.
2 - Profits. The company controls this data and realizes that they could make a ton of money off of it. Their federal contract might forbid it, but that's easily handled with a few lobbyists and sneaky riders on must-pass bills. Now, they can sell information to third parties legally. Maybe it's aggregate data/not personally identifiable (at least, at first to reduce any opposition) and maybe not. Either way, this information is now leaking out.
The answer to all of this, of course, is the answer to the question "Why does the NSA need to store metadata on EVERYONE?" They don't. However, they have fallen victim to a combination of lust for power and a "information gathering" fallacy. (Collecting some information proves useful against terrorists therefore collecting ALL THE DATA will prevent all the attacks. Except that they've just increased their signal to noise ratio to the point that they can't spot the tiny number of terrorist signals within all of the random noise.) If they scaled the program back to only collect metadata on a very limited number of individuals (proven to a judge enough to issue a warrant and with checks and balances to prevent abuse), they would have a higher signal to noise ratio and might actually catch more terrorists than from a random sweep.
How long until I can run MAME through WINE on my Android device. This way I can emulate an older game system while emulating Windows. If the game system I'm emulating is old enough, the resulting processing slowdown of the double emulation might add to the realism of the game system emulation!
Charter schools get their money from the public school system. The Waltons are giving money, not to open schools, but to "convince" politicians that what their failing school districts really need is to open a charter school and wind up giving even LESS money to the failing public schools. And if that didn't work, open a second or third charter school. And if the charter schools are failing, deploy the lobbyists to convince the politicians that it shouldn't be closed. (One charter school by us missed their self-reported goals for 6 years. When they were threatened with a shut down, the lobbyists were deployed and they were given another year. The next year, they missed their goals again and were finally shut down, though not without a fight.)
This isn't just the charter school movement but the whole Common Core garbage as well. Common Core supporters claim that it was written by educators, but there were only two on the panel and they refused to sign the finished document. Meanwhile, we've been hearing over and over again how our kids are failing and how it's all the fault of teachers. Why? So companies like Pearson can swoop in to "save" us. They get paid big bucks to administer high stakes tests to show just how much students are learning. If the students don't progress enough on the tests, the teachers are held responsible.
Of course, no one is allowed to see the tests except the students when they take them. I personally know 4 teachers who peaked though and when they tried to answer a multiple choice test for elementary school students, they each got a different answer. If four teachers with Master's degrees can't figure out the answer, what chance will students have?
The answer is that the students are SUPPOSED to fail. During the first round of tests, New York state students had a 31% passing rate. This meant that the tests claimed that 69% of New York State students were failing. Except that Pearson has a financial incentive to show that students are failing. Failing students might mean more money from test prep books, courses for students, courses on teaching for teachers, and sessions for administrators. Passing students? No more sales.
What's more, Bill Gates has a company called InBloom that is being deployed in New York State. Data on students (everything from names and addresses, to grades and medical information) is being uploaded to Amazon Cloud Servers. Parents have no say. We can't opt out or refuse. (A judge in a recent court case just reaffirmed this, though I expect another appeal.) The data *is* going to go to the cloud whether we like it or not. Once there, it will supposedly be used to help school officials, but InBloom has reserved the right to sell the data as they see fit. Even if they don't, though, I don't like all of my sons' data in the Cloud. How long until those cloud servers are hacked?
The more that our students "fail", the more the corporations can sink their teeth into the educational system. The more they do this, the more money they can pull out of it to "educate" our kids. All of this is just an attempt to profit off of our kids.
Maybe the charter schools by you are good. The ones by me? Not so much. First of all, they get to pick and choose what students they accept. Inevitably, any student with special needs isn't accepted. (We had our son in a Montessori school for a bit years ago and we were pushed out. We suspected this was because our son required PT and OT services. Later we found out that all students with PT or OT were being pushed out but we felt pressure not to talk since the principal was friends with some people high up in the district.) This selective enrollment means that the public schools get a bigger percentage of students who need services. This costs more money, of course, but the charter schools don't need to pay for that.
Next, there are the high stakes tests that New York has implemented. I'm opposed to those tests in general. They are administered by Pearson, not reviewed by ANYONE to see if they are appropriate, and don't show what students have learned. They only are used as a threat against teachers - if your kids do poorly, you might be out of a job. This means that the teachers teach to the test and toss aside anything that won't be on the test. However, the charter schools are exempt from this. They don't need to take these tests and so they can do what they want.
Third is the fact that they pull money from public schools. Those same public schools that now need to spend more money on the higher percentage of student with special needs and who feel pressured to teach to the test are finding themselves with less and less money and more money flows to the charter schools instead.
Finally, what tests the charter schools DO administer, they get to decide which results to publish. So if a few kids don't do well on the tests, those scores get tossed aside while the successful kids have their scores touted as the norm.
This all combines to lead public schools to ruin while diverting more money to charter schools. It becomes a vicious cycle too. Charter schools look stellar with selective test reporting while the struggling public schools look bad. So more charter schools are opened and the public schools get less and less money. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the kids who need special services get a second class education because the charter schools don't want to touch them. (Not that I'd want my sons in one of those.)
Like I said, this might not be the case for the Charter schools by you, but by me this has been my experience. They are run by greedy corporations who see the public school system as a big piggy bank that they can suck dry and they will manipulate test results and lobby politicians as much as they need to to get those dollars.
Sadly, at this point, much of the support/opposition seems based on the rationale of "If They are for it, then We are against it and vice versa." It doesn't matter what the content of the bill is. Compromise is conceding to The Enemy so there can be no discussion. You must just beat them down and do whatever you want. If you don't know what you want, just go in the opposite direction that The Other Party wants to go.
Would you support an ISP that charged excessively high rates on a site you frequent regularly (like slashdot)?
AT&T is seeking a patent to essentially do this. They will be able to deem some content "approved" and other content "not approved." Approved content will cost one rate (or be included in your normal plan) and not approved content will cost you more. Of course, if there is no check on how ISPs determine approved status, this is ripe for abuse. Did Slashdot run a story highly critical of AT&T? Suddenly, Slashdot isn't approved and visiting it costs you an arm and a leg. Netflix causing 'trouble" by competing with your expensive video service too much? They're not approved anymore... let's see if those Netflix users stick around when the extra fees hit.
It gets more complicated when your "private property" is a bridge that leads to somewhere really important.
Even moreso when your "private property" was actually given to you by the government for the purpose of developing a bridge to allow people to go places at a $X fee and then you decide that you want to ignore that deal and charge more to cross.
(Closest I can get this analogy to telecom companies getting government dollars to build networks to serve everyone, stopping before they are even close to the goal, and pocketing the rest of the money or asking for more to complete the project.)
Elections, sadly, have little to do with this. The ban was introduced by a lobbyist group representing big telecom companies. When the outcry emerged, the lobbyist group declared they'd rewrite the bill. Then, the lobbyist group called for the bill to be withdrawn. The legislators are mere middlemen doing what the lobbyists tell them to do. We could save money and get rid of the legislators entirely. Just let lobbyist groups hash out what the laws will be. (Not saying this will be better. Just that we'd at least save on salaries for worthless legislators.)
Ham, meanwhile, will declare victory because Nye wasn't able to* counter every single one of Ham's points specifically.
* Where "wasn't able to" really means "didn't have time to in the debate format even though he had more than enough facts to tear the arguments to shreds."
The problem with saying "Public Domain isn't the answer" is that Public Domain is the essential trade-off for copyright. The only reason people are given copyrights is that they are allowed a temporary monopoly on a work they created before it falls into the Public Domain. The Public Domain then helps feed the next round of creators who make works that copyright protects before they, in turn, fall into the Public Domain.
What we have today is works that essentially never leave copyright. If I released a book/movie/game/etc today, it would be covered by copyright until 2109 (assuming no law changes between now and then - a big assumption). The logic behind the copyright extension was that it would encourage the creator to make more books/movies/games/etc. The only problem is that I'd be 134 in the year 2109. If I'm even still alive then, I doubt I'll be in any shape to create many more works. If I'm not alive, then what is my copyright encouraging me to do? I doubt I'll rise zombie-like from the dead to pen a book about the after-life. ("It's Cold In The Ground" by Zombie Jason. But it before I eat your BRAAAIINNNSSS!!!!)
If the copyright expires on your work, you don't get any say in what people do with it. Were Shakespeare to come back to life today, he wouldn't have any say over some movie company making a modern musical version of Romeo and Juliet. Da Vinci wouldn't have a say in someone taking an image of the Mona Lisa and selling it on a postcard. If your work goes Public Domain and someone makes a "remix" version of it, that doesn't reflect poorly on you, but on the remix maker.
Copyrights NEED to expire at some point. It's hard enough trying to find out who owns the rights to Random Game From The 80s. Imagine trying to track down the rights holder for A Mid-Summer Night's Dream to make a movie based on it. It's not a question of SHOULD copyrights expire, but WHEN should they. I, and I'd wager most people here, think that copyright term length has been extended way past its usefulness and should be seriously trimmed back. (Personally, I'd go back to 14 years plus a one-time 14 year renewal, but at this point I'd take one 50 year copyright term as an improvement.)
If they included the pugli sticks, that might have made it more interesting. Only give Ham foam ones (since his "facts" are so lightweight) and give Nye steel ones (since his facts are pretty iron-clad). Now go "debate"!
Even if Ham leaves out the Bible verses/devil talk and goes straight "Intelligent Design" (aka Creationism Where God Is Hinted At Instead Of Explicitly Mentioned), Ham can toss "talking points" out faster than Bill can refute because it takes less time to say "X is a reason Evolution is false" than it takes to give the proof why that isn't the case.
Ham: {Creationist talking points #1-10} Nye: {Refutes 1, 2, 3.... runs out of time} Ham: {Creationist talking points #11-20} Nye: {Refutes 11, 12, 13, 14.... runs out of time.}
End of the debate. Ham declares himself the winner because Nye "couldn't" counter points #4-10 or #15-20 so "obviously" that means Evolution is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The Mythbusters tests this awhile back and couldn't replicate it at all. Now, I know they aren't "a scientific study", but they actually tried the best case scenarios and couldn't get it to work. You are more at risk if you set the pump up, go back into your car, get out of your car (thus building up a static charge), and then touch metal near the gas pump as it is being removed.
*raises hand*
That's my options in a nutshell. For TV, I have Time Warner Cable or I can go with satellite (and be locked into a contract). Then again, we've been on the cusp of cutting the cord for years so this might be the move that pushes us over the edge.
For Internet, however, we have Time Warner Cable. There's also Verizon DSL, but they have shown time and time again that they want to ditch it ASAP. Dial-up or no Internet isn't an option. Neither is relying solely on my cell phone for data (too expensive). So I'm essentially locked into one choice for Internet service. If they decide to charge me $100 a month for a 1Gbps connection and a 10GB cap, I have no choice but to pay. (So long as they are less expensive than cellular data plans which isn't hard to do.)
I'd love to see their networks forced open. One company should run the network and sell access to companies who then offer service to customers. This would increase competition, decrease prices, decrease network neutrality concerns (because the network company wouldn't be "competing" against NetFlix, etc), and improve service. Sadly, cable ISPs don't want this and will fight tooth and nail (and lobbyist) to prevent this from happening.
It might have, but the cable companies have likely spent a lot of money on lobbyists to convince officials that there's nothing to look into.
Lobbyists: The corporate version of the Jedi Mind Trick. "This isn't the cartel you are looking for. We can go about our business. We can move along."
What about her daughter who - according to the summary - is both a US citizen AND was denied entry as well. If I leave the country on business, are you saying I have no right to re-enter the country I have citizenship in if the government decides not to allow it? If so, the potential for abuse is incredible.
Exactly. The call for "control of the Internet" to go to the UN is really a call by some countries to outlaw anything online that they find offensive/inconvenient/annoying/etc. I can post a rant about President Obama using horrible language and even some claims that have been disproved a dozen times and I'm perfectly fine unless I make a threat on his life. In which case, expect a visit from the Secret Service as it is their job to protect the President's life. Even then, you might not be immediately arrested depending on their threat assessment. Do the same thing in China, for example, (criticize the leaders without threatening violence) and you might not be as lucky. Do it in North Korea and both you and your family will be very "unlucky." However, I - within the United States - can criticize the Saudi government all I want with no repercussions and they don't want this. If they had their way, this would be an offense worthy of extraditing me to their country over to stand trial. (Even if you had a decent chance of not being extradited, the threat along would be enough to quiet most people.) In other words, the Internet under UN control (and thus under these nations' influences) would become a draconian environment subject to the strictest laws of any land it might possibly reach.
Is the US perfect? Of course not. But these countries are far, far worse and letting them decide what should be legal or illegal online would be a huge mistake.
Technically, downloading movies from The Pirate Bay without the copyright holder's permission isn't legal (at least in the US). It's just near-impossible to prosecute unless you are uploading as well (which some BitTorrent clients do). To prosecute an uploader, you just need to look for someone offering the file for download. (We'll set aside for the moment any discussion on whether an IP address is sufficient evidence for conviction since it's obviously enough for the RIAA/MPAA to get trials started in many cases.) To prosecute a downloader, you would need access to ISP and/or website logs to identify who connected to what resources when. The former can be obtained easily and can "take down" someone who is sharing a lot of files with a lot of people. The latter takes a lot of resources (from court cases to obtain the logs to going through the logs to identify infringements) and can only "take down" one person who is downloading files.
The original Napster case affirmed that downloading content wasn't permitted, but further court cases haven't clarified that much since prosecuting a downloader costs so much for so little "return." If a downloader is ever prosecuted, though, don't expect the courts to rule that downloading is perfectly legal.
Given how few merchants have even looked at the signature area of my card, the thief signing the card wouldn't impact whether or not the merchant accepted the thieve's signature as being valid.
Most times I don't even sign my cards. Yes, I know I'm supposed to, but I've gone for years without signing it. It always seemed odd to me to give a potential credit card thief a copy of my signature along with my card. Maybe once did someone even look for the signature and even then it was more of a "Oh, you didn't sign it" than a "We can't accept that card unsigned."
Just to add some more to the mix, NASA has some information on asteroid sizes ( http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/asteroidfact.html ). Let's assume we picked a small asteroid, Castalia, and mined that at 63 million kg per day. We'd "use it all up" in just over 21 years. (Again, this is assuming the "perfect case" of the asteroid being entirely made of materials we'd want. No waste products produced at all.) A larger asteroid like Ida would take us 4.3 million of years to use up. Remember, not only is space is really big, but many of the things that occupy it are really big as well!
I looked up some figures (http://www.infomine.com/minesite/) and found that some mines operate at 63,000 tonnes per day. Let's assume that Mine Base Moon ramps up to that level fairly quickly. The mass of the Moon is 7.34767309 × 10^22 kilograms. 63,000 tonnes = 63,000,000 kg. At this rate, it would take 1,166,297,315,873,016 days (or 3 trillion years) to use up the entire Moon. We'd be in greater risk of the Sun going red giant first.
Of course, we don't need to "use up" the Moon. Let's assume we just need to change the mass by 1/100% to make a difference. This means we only have 116,629,731,587 days or over 300 million years.
I don't think changing the Moon's gravity due to mining is something we need to worry about for quite some time.
Granted this isn't college, but New York state tackled "grade inflation" by giving students tests that weren't developmentally appropriate and based on curriculum they hadn't been taught. The result was that only about 30% of students passed. The bonus was that State Ed and the governor could then point to those tests as further proof that teachers are failing our students and 1) we need to have more of these tests to assess their performance and 2) teachers should be bound by EngageNY curriculum which literally reads like a script except that actors get more leeway in their roles. (It tells the teacher what to teach, for how long - in 10 minute segments - how to teach it, what questions to ask, what responses should be, etc. Why have a teacher when you can have a robot instead?)
I know that Microsoft still likes to think of itself as the 800lb gorilla that can just walk into any area it chooses and dominate, but in the eBook market, Microsoft is a mouse and Amazon is the 800lb gorilla. For better or worse, Amazon essentially *is* the eBook market. (Source - Amazon has 67% of the market. Next is Barnes & Noble with 11.8% and Apple with 8.2%.)
If Microsoft is going to win over eBook readers, they are going to need to offer something substantial to woo market share away from Amazon. I honestly don't see that happening and it's not like they can use Windows 8 as leverage the way they used to leverage Windows to prop up IE against other browsers. They'll probably launch this, it will languish in the market for a few years, and then it will be killed off.
Sure. Let's not shut down the horrible program that a ton of people oppose and instead hand the data over to a company to manage and keep secure. What's the worst that can happen?
Off the top of my head:
1 - Hackings. No database is secure. If anyone was to store the data securely (putting aside for the moment the question of whether they should have the data in the first place), I'd trust the NSA to do it over some random company. At the very least, this reduces the potential attack vectors.
2 - Profits. The company controls this data and realizes that they could make a ton of money off of it. Their federal contract might forbid it, but that's easily handled with a few lobbyists and sneaky riders on must-pass bills. Now, they can sell information to third parties legally. Maybe it's aggregate data/not personally identifiable (at least, at first to reduce any opposition) and maybe not. Either way, this information is now leaking out.
The answer to all of this, of course, is the answer to the question "Why does the NSA need to store metadata on EVERYONE?" They don't. However, they have fallen victim to a combination of lust for power and a "information gathering" fallacy. (Collecting some information proves useful against terrorists therefore collecting ALL THE DATA will prevent all the attacks. Except that they've just increased their signal to noise ratio to the point that they can't spot the tiny number of terrorist signals within all of the random noise.) If they scaled the program back to only collect metadata on a very limited number of individuals (proven to a judge enough to issue a warrant and with checks and balances to prevent abuse), they would have a higher signal to noise ratio and might actually catch more terrorists than from a random sweep.
How long until I can run MAME through WINE on my Android device. This way I can emulate an older game system while emulating Windows. If the game system I'm emulating is old enough, the resulting processing slowdown of the double emulation might add to the realism of the game system emulation!
Charter schools get their money from the public school system. The Waltons are giving money, not to open schools, but to "convince" politicians that what their failing school districts really need is to open a charter school and wind up giving even LESS money to the failing public schools. And if that didn't work, open a second or third charter school. And if the charter schools are failing, deploy the lobbyists to convince the politicians that it shouldn't be closed. (One charter school by us missed their self-reported goals for 6 years. When they were threatened with a shut down, the lobbyists were deployed and they were given another year. The next year, they missed their goals again and were finally shut down, though not without a fight.)
This isn't just the charter school movement but the whole Common Core garbage as well. Common Core supporters claim that it was written by educators, but there were only two on the panel and they refused to sign the finished document. Meanwhile, we've been hearing over and over again how our kids are failing and how it's all the fault of teachers. Why? So companies like Pearson can swoop in to "save" us. They get paid big bucks to administer high stakes tests to show just how much students are learning. If the students don't progress enough on the tests, the teachers are held responsible.
Of course, no one is allowed to see the tests except the students when they take them. I personally know 4 teachers who peaked though and when they tried to answer a multiple choice test for elementary school students, they each got a different answer. If four teachers with Master's degrees can't figure out the answer, what chance will students have?
The answer is that the students are SUPPOSED to fail. During the first round of tests, New York state students had a 31% passing rate. This meant that the tests claimed that 69% of New York State students were failing. Except that Pearson has a financial incentive to show that students are failing. Failing students might mean more money from test prep books, courses for students, courses on teaching for teachers, and sessions for administrators. Passing students? No more sales.
What's more, Bill Gates has a company called InBloom that is being deployed in New York State. Data on students (everything from names and addresses, to grades and medical information) is being uploaded to Amazon Cloud Servers. Parents have no say. We can't opt out or refuse. (A judge in a recent court case just reaffirmed this, though I expect another appeal.) The data *is* going to go to the cloud whether we like it or not. Once there, it will supposedly be used to help school officials, but InBloom has reserved the right to sell the data as they see fit. Even if they don't, though, I don't like all of my sons' data in the Cloud. How long until those cloud servers are hacked?
The more that our students "fail", the more the corporations can sink their teeth into the educational system. The more they do this, the more money they can pull out of it to "educate" our kids. All of this is just an attempt to profit off of our kids.
Maybe the charter schools by you are good. The ones by me? Not so much. First of all, they get to pick and choose what students they accept. Inevitably, any student with special needs isn't accepted. (We had our son in a Montessori school for a bit years ago and we were pushed out. We suspected this was because our son required PT and OT services. Later we found out that all students with PT or OT were being pushed out but we felt pressure not to talk since the principal was friends with some people high up in the district.) This selective enrollment means that the public schools get a bigger percentage of students who need services. This costs more money, of course, but the charter schools don't need to pay for that.
Next, there are the high stakes tests that New York has implemented. I'm opposed to those tests in general. They are administered by Pearson, not reviewed by ANYONE to see if they are appropriate, and don't show what students have learned. They only are used as a threat against teachers - if your kids do poorly, you might be out of a job. This means that the teachers teach to the test and toss aside anything that won't be on the test. However, the charter schools are exempt from this. They don't need to take these tests and so they can do what they want.
Third is the fact that they pull money from public schools. Those same public schools that now need to spend more money on the higher percentage of student with special needs and who feel pressured to teach to the test are finding themselves with less and less money and more money flows to the charter schools instead.
Finally, what tests the charter schools DO administer, they get to decide which results to publish. So if a few kids don't do well on the tests, those scores get tossed aside while the successful kids have their scores touted as the norm.
This all combines to lead public schools to ruin while diverting more money to charter schools. It becomes a vicious cycle too. Charter schools look stellar with selective test reporting while the struggling public schools look bad. So more charter schools are opened and the public schools get less and less money. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, the kids who need special services get a second class education because the charter schools don't want to touch them. (Not that I'd want my sons in one of those.)
Like I said, this might not be the case for the Charter schools by you, but by me this has been my experience. They are run by greedy corporations who see the public school system as a big piggy bank that they can suck dry and they will manipulate test results and lobby politicians as much as they need to to get those dollars.
Sadly, at this point, much of the support/opposition seems based on the rationale of "If They are for it, then We are against it and vice versa." It doesn't matter what the content of the bill is. Compromise is conceding to The Enemy so there can be no discussion. You must just beat them down and do whatever you want. If you don't know what you want, just go in the opposite direction that The Other Party wants to go.
AT&T is seeking a patent to essentially do this. They will be able to deem some content "approved" and other content "not approved." Approved content will cost one rate (or be included in your normal plan) and not approved content will cost you more. Of course, if there is no check on how ISPs determine approved status, this is ripe for abuse. Did Slashdot run a story highly critical of AT&T? Suddenly, Slashdot isn't approved and visiting it costs you an arm and a leg. Netflix causing 'trouble" by competing with your expensive video service too much? They're not approved anymore... let's see if those Netflix users stick around when the extra fees hit.
Even moreso when your "private property" was actually given to you by the government for the purpose of developing a bridge to allow people to go places at a $X fee and then you decide that you want to ignore that deal and charge more to cross.
(Closest I can get this analogy to telecom companies getting government dollars to build networks to serve everyone, stopping before they are even close to the goal, and pocketing the rest of the money or asking for more to complete the project.)
Elections, sadly, have little to do with this. The ban was introduced by a lobbyist group representing big telecom companies. When the outcry emerged, the lobbyist group declared they'd rewrite the bill. Then, the lobbyist group called for the bill to be withdrawn. The legislators are mere middlemen doing what the lobbyists tell them to do. We could save money and get rid of the legislators entirely. Just let lobbyist groups hash out what the laws will be. (Not saying this will be better. Just that we'd at least save on salaries for worthless legislators.)
Ham, meanwhile, will declare victory because Nye wasn't able to* counter every single one of Ham's points specifically.
* Where "wasn't able to" really means "didn't have time to in the debate format even though he had more than enough facts to tear the arguments to shreds."
The problem with saying "Public Domain isn't the answer" is that Public Domain is the essential trade-off for copyright. The only reason people are given copyrights is that they are allowed a temporary monopoly on a work they created before it falls into the Public Domain. The Public Domain then helps feed the next round of creators who make works that copyright protects before they, in turn, fall into the Public Domain.
What we have today is works that essentially never leave copyright. If I released a book/movie/game/etc today, it would be covered by copyright until 2109 (assuming no law changes between now and then - a big assumption). The logic behind the copyright extension was that it would encourage the creator to make more books/movies/games/etc. The only problem is that I'd be 134 in the year 2109. If I'm even still alive then, I doubt I'll be in any shape to create many more works. If I'm not alive, then what is my copyright encouraging me to do? I doubt I'll rise zombie-like from the dead to pen a book about the after-life. ("It's Cold In The Ground" by Zombie Jason. But it before I eat your BRAAAIINNNSSS!!!!)
If the copyright expires on your work, you don't get any say in what people do with it. Were Shakespeare to come back to life today, he wouldn't have any say over some movie company making a modern musical version of Romeo and Juliet. Da Vinci wouldn't have a say in someone taking an image of the Mona Lisa and selling it on a postcard. If your work goes Public Domain and someone makes a "remix" version of it, that doesn't reflect poorly on you, but on the remix maker.
Copyrights NEED to expire at some point. It's hard enough trying to find out who owns the rights to Random Game From The 80s. Imagine trying to track down the rights holder for A Mid-Summer Night's Dream to make a movie based on it. It's not a question of SHOULD copyrights expire, but WHEN should they. I, and I'd wager most people here, think that copyright term length has been extended way past its usefulness and should be seriously trimmed back. (Personally, I'd go back to 14 years plus a one-time 14 year renewal, but at this point I'd take one 50 year copyright term as an improvement.)
If they included the pugli sticks, that might have made it more interesting. Only give Ham foam ones (since his "facts" are so lightweight) and give Nye steel ones (since his facts are pretty iron-clad). Now go "debate"!
Even if Ham leaves out the Bible verses/devil talk and goes straight "Intelligent Design" (aka Creationism Where God Is Hinted At Instead Of Explicitly Mentioned), Ham can toss "talking points" out faster than Bill can refute because it takes less time to say "X is a reason Evolution is false" than it takes to give the proof why that isn't the case.
Ham: {Creationist talking points #1-10}
Nye: {Refutes 1, 2, 3.... runs out of time}
Ham: {Creationist talking points #11-20}
Nye: {Refutes 11, 12, 13, 14.... runs out of time.}
End of the debate. Ham declares himself the winner because Nye "couldn't" counter points #4-10 or #15-20 so "obviously" that means Evolution is wrong.