As ValleyWag put it (as quoted by Mashable):...they could pass the time reading a 2000 work by Möller. Its German title is "Kinder sind Pornos," which means "Children are pornography." Even in Google's rough translation, the gist [of the paper, not of the title] is clear enough: Möller argues that nonviolent child pornography does no harm. He relates the frosty reception he received when he put forth this view at a conference in Nuremberg in 2000.
Since Mashable quoted Valleywag who gave us the gist of a machine generated translation of a 10 year old article originally in German, it's completely obvious. Especially when the translation is so clear:
It is in the rest of the Judgement quoted abuse therapist without recognizable to its methodology would be a critical distance.
Just try to argue with that. You can't. Or this one:
"The opinion that children have sexuality and can enjoy this too, should / should not be distributed," says Schweer further. That this is not an opinion, but a scientific fact that is not doubted by many self-proclaimed protectors children, he is silent.
The monster. He should/should not be in prison for quoting that.
You mean the album "Virgin Killers" by the Scorpions? Probably when they mentioned the banned Scorpions album cover. Maybe you noticed the large font "Scorpions" at the top center of the album, nearly touching the word "Virgin" of the album cover, if you can raise your eyes that far.
But it's disingenuous to say they want to burn animals for a living. What they do for a living is try to build a device that could save many lives and help many more reduce their suffering. They are required to test them on animals before humans, it's part of the job. It's not a part of the job they like, but it's necessary so they do it. Could there be a sadistic few? Sure, but it's unlikely. There are far easier and better paid jobs that allow you to be sadistic to animals than research assistant at a lab. Rats are cheap, you can buy or even catch all you like. Getting your PhD to satisfy your sadism toward rats is taking things a bit far.
I would guess that most of them feel bad for the rats as well. But they can justify it with what they consider a higher purpose, reducing death and suffering. It might not be justifiable to you, but it is to them. It doesn't mean they like doing it.
And I respect your opinion if you don't think it's worth it. Just please recognize that both sides of the argument have merit, and don't assume those that think differently than you on the issue are amoral or hate animals, but probably only disagree with you over which is more important.
.22 sub sonic rounds and a 2 liter bottle duct filled with plastic bags taped to the end will work as a suppressor for quite a few shots. A 20 Oz bottle will work for a couple of shots and is more concealable. The ammo costs the same as regular.22LR ammo, $3 for 50 rounds was cheapest I found it. It hurts the accuracy, but most gun crime is at extremely close range; less than 5 yards, IIRC.
Not that it would be very useful for street crime, bit if you have a.22 rifle with a long barrel just using the subsonic ammunition is enough, I've heard more than one that sounded quieter than a BB gun.
Our mobile data demands last year were 1 Exabyte - Which is roughly the equivalent of 1/5 the words ever spoken by humans.
No wonder everyone feels crazy. Nothing in evolution prepared us for this much information about anything/everything/everybody all the time. I mean, it's great, it's fantastic, we now essentially carry a device that not only can communicate on several different levels with nearly anyone on the planet anywhere anytime, but it's also a repository of most human knowledge and on their way of becoming capable of nearly everything (Voice, then text, then cameras, mp3, web, navigation, apps then?). True, the data and communication links aren't in your pocket, and it's far from complete. But that's a lot of information. And it's all nearly instantaneous. Now we get frustrated not only if we can't get the information, but if we just can't get it fast enough. 5 seconds of "connecting..." is enough to get us mad sometimes. Never mind that 15-20 years ago it would have involved a trip to a library or several libraries, phone calls, or maybe taking a trip and talking to locals, and take days, hours, or months to find the info we're looking for, half a minute waiting can get us angry, we need to hear what kind of music they play at specific coffeehouses in Prague right now, dammit, we're trying to plan a trip here.
ADD isn't a disorder in this context, it's a result. It gets hard to concentrate for a while nearly everything can be looked up in seconds, nearly every desire that starts "I want to see...", "I want to hear...", "I want to tell..." or "I want to know..." can be instantly fulfilled. If it's not instantly gratified, it's quickly forgotten, and another desire takes it's place, even if it's just been seconds.
All opinion, and I'm not arguing that ADD isn't a disease, just that our technological environment has a lot to do with it.
But why arbitrarily make it backwards? Make damage to the rear count way less than damage to the front. There's no reason to reverse it.
And why not count wall damage? Immovable solid object damage should be easier to model than moving deformable one. If it really is even modeled, otherwise a simple damage based on speed and angle of impact would suffice.
The strategies learned would be unique to these rules, which effectively provide video game shields to the cars. For instance, a car backed into the wall is only vulnerable on the sides, and completely indestructible when hit from the front. Actually, facing backwards to traffic with one side of your car against the wall would only leave a very narrow approach angle in which you could be damaged. But then the cars trying to hit you can aim with impunity, as long as the side of their car doesn't hit your car, they can't be hurt either, since they'll either hit you with the front of their car (shields) or the wall (marshmallow fluff). Neither is a useful strategy in the real world, where we don't have invulnerability to collisions or unbreakable shields.
As for the damage reset - the competitors could target undamaged cars under certain conditions-as long as enough do this, lurkers would be subject to group attacks. If it's about strategy, then let it be about strategy. If a lurking strategy wins (and I doubt it would, it's not a secret), it won't work the next time - no rule would be needed.
I understand the point of the exercise. Applying these rules to it just doesn't make any sense to me.
# Cars do not take any damage when colliding with walls.
# Cars do not take any damage in the front when colliding with each other.
# Cars do take the doubled amount of damage in the rear when colliding with each other.
All of these rules are the opposite of how actual demolition derbies work. Smashing a car into the wall causes large amounts of damage. Damage to the front (the radiator, engine etc) is way more effective than damage than the rear. Most cars are driven backwards because the trunk is just a big crumple zone. As long as it doesn't get the wheels or axle, damage in the rear doesn't really matter.
each car's damage is reset to zero every time a competitor gets wrecked.
OK, they need to call it something else now. It's not a demolition derby anymore. There's no floating wrenches that repair all damage in real life either.
I fail to see any improvement by introducing a computer into a electrical connection. They're still opt-in (at least here), but they really provide no benefit to the consumer, and a huge point of failure when something goes wrong. Even when they're working as designed, your air conditioner won't work as well when it's hottest. And now they have these huge security flaws that could let someone remotely turn off your electricity, change how much your bill is, and even mess with the electric grid. They really are a nightmare for the consumer.
Unless I could find that software, then I'd get one in a second, build some fake solar cells and windmills on the roof, and spin that thing backwards 24/7. I'd even build a perpetual motion machine that was secretly powered by electricity and claim it was producing it, just to mess with people.
Based on one study, done 71 years ago, and a visit to two schools in an anecdote in a talk by one person (which sound like BS to me, you'd be hard pressed to find ANY group of 50 adults who don't know the area of a rectangle, let alone among college educated teachers), we should teach less math so the kids magically learn more.
This is the biggest bunch of idiocy I've seen in a while.
Why don't they follow the trend with phones and have a smaller slide out keyboard. It doesn't have to be a full one, just one like cell phones have, Qwerty only with an Alt key for numbers and special characters. If three rows of full size keys are too much, even a cell phone sized keyboard would help, I've kinda gotten used to typing with my thumbs now. It beats a touch screen keyboard.
As the tip of the blade hooks into the loop of the chain mail glove and tries to pull it, and your hand inside it, through the slot in the table and being partially successful, you'll wish you'd just cut your finger off.
Some tools are much safer without gloves. Drill Presses and vertical band saws are in this category.
The desert would require buildings/houses that can reflect quite a bit of sun rays.If it doesn't, houses will start to cook people. Having that much heat, sand, and wind will make having open houses impractical as well.
White paint, doors and windows have been around a long, long time. Humans have lived in the desert now for a long, long time.
Have you ever been to Palm Springs, California or Phoenix, Arizona? Both of them are in the desert, with pretty much nothing but desert between them. Driving between them I was surprised at the number of farms. There are long stretches of nothing, but there's still plenty of agriculture. And the Palm Springs area is loaded with greenery, you can grow nearly anything there. Both of these areas were nothing but desert when they were founded.
What other job do you get to have a lawyer defend you when they try to fire you? I'm not talking about suing a company for wrongful termination after getting fired, but actually stopping you from getting fired. Does one exist?
Are there any other careers out there with a 1% or lower chance of getting fired?
Have you noticed how they always make the idea of there being someone who controls your working conditions and employment sound ridiculous, while nearly everyone else in the world with a job has a boss? Why are unions always given a pass on this argument? Why doesn't every reporter call them out on this nonsense? How about "You must be incredibly ignorant to act as though the working relationship shared by the vast, vast majority of people on this planet is unconscionable at it's core. Is this due to some mental defect or are you required to spew idiocy by the person who controls your working conditions and employment?"
You have a job. You can lose that job if you don't do it, or do it poorly enough. Someone has to make the decision to fire you, it doesn't congeal out of phlogiston, a person must be involved (even if they just told the computer to fire thousands.) Although the teachers' union have shown us a vastly different way of doing things by making a process that takes minutes and costs nearly nothing for everyone else into a multi-year legal battle costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cash strapped educational system, it has only proven to be a much larger clusterfuck.
I love good teachers, there are teachers in my family, but why their jobs should be protected the way they are is just insane. A guaranteed job for life after working 3 years? Are there even any other jobs for life anymore? Can anyone say they're sure to be even in the same industry, let alone the same job, 10 years from now?
That might be quite thin for a cell phone, but over a half inch is really thick for a watch.
And the cell phone has pretty much replaced the watch, I doubt that trend is going to reverse itself. There are too many functions of a modern cell phone that wouldn't work as well if it were strapped to your wrist (camera, texting, showing someone a picture, etc.)
When they want to, congress can sneak in small changes of law and pork projects into a bill, then claim not to notice it happening. All it takes is one person on a committee to get this inserted into a bill that's likely to pass, and it's done.
At the same time, they claim their hands are tied to fix even simple problems.
The tax code is over 15,000 pages long. There are hundreds of changes each year.
Also, the Feds don't have to prosecute these cases. There's thousands of laws on the books that are violated openly and never prosecuted. In this particular case this "crime" lacks any criminal intent and represents no financial loss to the IRS, as they still get taxes paid to them. There's no victim, no damage, no loss of money. There has to be more important cases to prosecute that these.
If they haven't changed it already, it's because they don't want to. They could have tacked this onto a hundred different bills and no one in Washington DC other than programmers and accountants would have noticed or cared. This is an easy fix, not something that needs it's own legislative event.
Koller is also confident that consumers will react well to the news - despite the fact that Ubisoft was forced to defend its proposition in the face of angry gamers.
"From our research, this will be received quite positively," he insisted.
They really are completely delusional. What benefit does this provide to the consumers that they'll react positively to? Is there even any theoretical benefit to the consumer?
Maybe the research was done entirely among Sony executives.
"It may be a trivial point in practice, but I think that one canidate with 100 million corporate dollars in his warchest is better off than a canidate with 10 million in his warchest and 90 million being spent by corporations on ads for him, which he doesn't actually control. The canidate who picks his own ads knows exactly what his strategy is and can coordinate ads to match it better than a semi-independant entity."
I don't think political favors work like that. Word would "get around" about exactly what kind of ad the poitician wanted. Considering the stakes, both sides need to know exactly what they're buying and selling - laws for millions.
Sadly, they'll probably end up with 75% of the cash they had before, but all of the advertising expenses of the campaign paid for, which is probably way more than 50% of the costs (Wild guess on my part, but TV ain't cheap.) This is how they get the cash out, they get to keep whatever is left at the end of the campaign.
You can stand on my neighbors property, and be less than 2 inches from my house. They still can't legally film inside my house with his permission. I had an apartment in Chicago that was right up against the public sidewalk in front and right against the alley in back, you could easily be on public property and get as close as you want. Still illegal to film inside my house. Another apartment, window to window distance to the adjacent buildings was about 4 inches. I could have probably set up a camera and lens to see through the holes between the fabric weave of my neighbor's curtains, but that doesn't mean it would be legal for me to do so on her bathroom window. The police should be subject to the same law.
Cameras are in common use. This doesn't give the cops the right to set one up to look inside your house through a pinhole in your curtains. If they attempt to look inside the house, in any way, with any technology that ever comes up, without a warrant this is a violation of your expectation of privacy and they should be locked up. Not disciplined, but subject to the exact same penalties as if I put a camera in the bathroom of a woman's house.
Now, that's what makes sense and should happen. In reality, with the fucked up judges in this country, they might arbitrarily rule that the cops can put a camera in your ass, and rule it illegal to crap it out.
"But did you learn something about computers? Chances you did learn something if you are now on Slashdot. The role of computers should be to provide a shiny toy for students to want to figure out how it works. To learn reading to play an RPG, to learn history to learn the backstory behind war games, etc."
Well, I learned about computers from Commodore and later Atari computers I had at home. The Apple 2 in school was a locked down box that you could do nothing on but play crappy edutainment (Am I the only one on Slashdot that thought Oregon Trail was just boring crap that didn't really teach anything?) The teacher would prevent you from doing anything that would result in you learning about how computers work. Did your teacher let you take them apart, try to write programs, or even give a basic explanation of the hardware? I had to wait until we got the Commodore to learn anything useful about computers.
"And how many kids who are have graduated still remember watching The Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy? My guess is a lot of them."
And what has a generation of watching Bill Nye done to improve science education? It's worse than ever, the number of students pursuing science degrees has been declining. And actual understanding of science in the population is atrocious.
"Because that would be removing over half the class and relying on a book that is usually severely out of date?"
What are you teaching in elementary schools that's completely out of date? Math? Writing? Reading? Social Skills? History is the only thing that arguably needs to be up to date, but that doesn't mean that you need to replace a 10 year old history book, it's still accurate from the Big Bang to 2000AD (or the last 6000 years, if you're and IDiot.) You can still learn a lot from a 50 year old history book.
The sad thing is that a lot of these technologies are pushed to teach kids computers, when most kids already know how to use one.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Mashable quoted Valleywag who gave us the gist of a machine generated translation of a 10 year old article originally in German, it's completely obvious. Especially when the translation is so clear:
Just try to argue with that. You can't. Or this one:
The monster. He should/should not be in prison for quoting that.
You mean the album "Virgin Killers" by the Scorpions? Probably when they mentioned the banned Scorpions album cover. Maybe you noticed the large font "Scorpions" at the top center of the album, nearly touching the word "Virgin" of the album cover, if you can raise your eyes that far.
Feeling bad about the rats is fine, it's normal.
But it's disingenuous to say they want to burn animals for a living. What they do for a living is try to build a device that could save many lives and help many more reduce their suffering. They are required to test them on animals before humans, it's part of the job. It's not a part of the job they like, but it's necessary so they do it. Could there be a sadistic few? Sure, but it's unlikely. There are far easier and better paid jobs that allow you to be sadistic to animals than research assistant at a lab. Rats are cheap, you can buy or even catch all you like. Getting your PhD to satisfy your sadism toward rats is taking things a bit far.
I would guess that most of them feel bad for the rats as well. But they can justify it with what they consider a higher purpose, reducing death and suffering. It might not be justifiable to you, but it is to them. It doesn't mean they like doing it.
And I respect your opinion if you don't think it's worth it. Just please recognize that both sides of the argument have merit, and don't assume those that think differently than you on the issue are amoral or hate animals, but probably only disagree with you over which is more important.
.22 sub sonic rounds and a 2 liter bottle duct filled with plastic bags taped to the end will work as a suppressor for quite a few shots. A 20 Oz bottle will work for a couple of shots and is more concealable. The ammo costs the same as regular .22LR ammo, $3 for 50 rounds was cheapest I found it. It hurts the accuracy, but most gun crime is at extremely close range; less than 5 yards, IIRC.
Not that it would be very useful for street crime, bit if you have a .22 rifle with a long barrel just using the subsonic ammunition is enough, I've heard more than one that sounded quieter than a BB gun.
Wow, a $1.2 billion dollar fine on $1.7 billion dollars of illegal profit.
That'll show 'em. I'm sure they learned their lesson. Crime doesn't pay.
Unless you consider a half a billion dollars profit as pay. Then crime apparently pays a shitload.
Our mobile data demands last year were 1 Exabyte - Which is roughly the equivalent of 1/5 the words ever spoken by humans.
No wonder everyone feels crazy. Nothing in evolution prepared us for this much information about anything/everything/everybody all the time. I mean, it's great, it's fantastic, we now essentially carry a device that not only can communicate on several different levels with nearly anyone on the planet anywhere anytime, but it's also a repository of most human knowledge and on their way of becoming capable of nearly everything (Voice, then text, then cameras, mp3, web, navigation, apps then?). True, the data and communication links aren't in your pocket, and it's far from complete. But that's a lot of information. And it's all nearly instantaneous. Now we get frustrated not only if we can't get the information, but if we just can't get it fast enough. 5 seconds of "connecting..." is enough to get us mad sometimes. Never mind that 15-20 years ago it would have involved a trip to a library or several libraries, phone calls, or maybe taking a trip and talking to locals, and take days, hours, or months to find the info we're looking for, half a minute waiting can get us angry, we need to hear what kind of music they play at specific coffeehouses in Prague right now, dammit, we're trying to plan a trip here.
ADD isn't a disorder in this context, it's a result. It gets hard to concentrate for a while nearly everything can be looked up in seconds, nearly every desire that starts "I want to see...", "I want to hear...", "I want to tell..." or "I want to know..." can be instantly fulfilled. If it's not instantly gratified, it's quickly forgotten, and another desire takes it's place, even if it's just been seconds.
All opinion, and I'm not arguing that ADD isn't a disease, just that our technological environment has a lot to do with it.
But why arbitrarily make it backwards? Make damage to the rear count way less than damage to the front. There's no reason to reverse it.
And why not count wall damage? Immovable solid object damage should be easier to model than moving deformable one. If it really is even modeled, otherwise a simple damage based on speed and angle of impact would suffice.
The strategies learned would be unique to these rules, which effectively provide video game shields to the cars. For instance, a car backed into the wall is only vulnerable on the sides, and completely indestructible when hit from the front. Actually, facing backwards to traffic with one side of your car against the wall would only leave a very narrow approach angle in which you could be damaged. But then the cars trying to hit you can aim with impunity, as long as the side of their car doesn't hit your car, they can't be hurt either, since they'll either hit you with the front of their car (shields) or the wall (marshmallow fluff). Neither is a useful strategy in the real world, where we don't have invulnerability to collisions or unbreakable shields.
As for the damage reset - the competitors could target undamaged cars under certain conditions-as long as enough do this, lurkers would be subject to group attacks. If it's about strategy, then let it be about strategy. If a lurking strategy wins (and I doubt it would, it's not a secret), it won't work the next time - no rule would be needed.
I understand the point of the exercise. Applying these rules to it just doesn't make any sense to me.
All of these rules are the opposite of how actual demolition derbies work. Smashing a car into the wall causes large amounts of damage. Damage to the front (the radiator, engine etc) is way more effective than damage than the rear. Most cars are driven backwards because the trunk is just a big crumple zone. As long as it doesn't get the wheels or axle, damage in the rear doesn't really matter.
OK, they need to call it something else now. It's not a demolition derby anymore. There's no floating wrenches that repair all damage in real life either.
Try Time Traveler Understander for simple fourth dimension gaming:
http://www.cracked.com/video_17823_a-helpful-tutorial-game-that-would-confuse-einstein.html
Not only that, but the low was 0.08 and it closed at 0.10, so it actually went up at the end of the day.
I fail to see any improvement by introducing a computer into a electrical connection. They're still opt-in (at least here), but they really provide no benefit to the consumer, and a huge point of failure when something goes wrong. Even when they're working as designed, your air conditioner won't work as well when it's hottest. And now they have these huge security flaws that could let someone remotely turn off your electricity, change how much your bill is, and even mess with the electric grid. They really are a nightmare for the consumer.
Unless I could find that software, then I'd get one in a second, build some fake solar cells and windmills on the roof, and spin that thing backwards 24/7. I'd even build a perpetual motion machine that was secretly powered by electricity and claim it was producing it, just to mess with people.
Whoops, thought it was from 1939.
Processor works, memory's corrupt.
Based on one study, done 71 years ago, and a visit to two schools in an anecdote in a talk by one person (which sound like BS to me, you'd be hard pressed to find ANY group of 50 adults who don't know the area of a rectangle, let alone among college educated teachers), we should teach less math so the kids magically learn more.
This is the biggest bunch of idiocy I've seen in a while.
Why don't they follow the trend with phones and have a smaller slide out keyboard. It doesn't have to be a full one, just one like cell phones have, Qwerty only with an Alt key for numbers and special characters. If three rows of full size keys are too much, even a cell phone sized keyboard would help, I've kinda gotten used to typing with my thumbs now. It beats a touch screen keyboard.
As the tip of the blade hooks into the loop of the chain mail glove and tries to pull it, and your hand inside it, through the slot in the table and being partially successful, you'll wish you'd just cut your finger off.
Some tools are much safer without gloves. Drill Presses and vertical band saws are in this category.
White paint, doors and windows have been around a long, long time. Humans have lived in the desert now for a long, long time.
Have you ever been to Palm Springs, California or Phoenix, Arizona? Both of them are in the desert, with pretty much nothing but desert between them. Driving between them I was surprised at the number of farms. There are long stretches of nothing, but there's still plenty of agriculture. And the Palm Springs area is loaded with greenery, you can grow nearly anything there. Both of these areas were nothing but desert when they were founded.
You can see the farms bordering the desert here:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=palm+springs+california+aerial+1920&hl=en&safe=off&gbv=2&ie=UTF8&ei=_-ecS_abB6DSNPzd6eYN&hq=aerial+1920&hnear=Palm+Springs,+CA&ll=33.576299,-116.100426&spn=0.139015,0.308647&t=h&z=12
Palm Springs in 1965:
http://www.palmspringslife.com/images/Blog2006-01-13w1965.jpg
If Cocaine then StripperPoleDance = 1 else StripperCount=0
The research would be valuable to the stripper, at least.
What other job do you get to have a lawyer defend you when they try to fire you? I'm not talking about suing a company for wrongful termination after getting fired, but actually stopping you from getting fired. Does one exist?
Are there any other careers out there with a 1% or lower chance of getting fired?
Have you noticed how they always make the idea of there being someone who controls your working conditions and employment sound ridiculous, while nearly everyone else in the world with a job has a boss? Why are unions always given a pass on this argument? Why doesn't every reporter call them out on this nonsense? How about "You must be incredibly ignorant to act as though the working relationship shared by the vast, vast majority of people on this planet is unconscionable at it's core. Is this due to some mental defect or are you required to spew idiocy by the person who controls your working conditions and employment?"
You have a job. You can lose that job if you don't do it, or do it poorly enough. Someone has to make the decision to fire you, it doesn't congeal out of phlogiston, a person must be involved (even if they just told the computer to fire thousands.) Although the teachers' union have shown us a vastly different way of doing things by making a process that takes minutes and costs nearly nothing for everyone else into a multi-year legal battle costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cash strapped educational system, it has only proven to be a much larger clusterfuck.
I love good teachers, there are teachers in my family, but why their jobs should be protected the way they are is just insane. A guaranteed job for life after working 3 years? Are there even any other jobs for life anymore? Can anyone say they're sure to be even in the same industry, let alone the same job, 10 years from now?
That might be quite thin for a cell phone, but over a half inch is really thick for a watch. And the cell phone has pretty much replaced the watch, I doubt that trend is going to reverse itself. There are too many functions of a modern cell phone that wouldn't work as well if it were strapped to your wrist (camera, texting, showing someone a picture, etc.)
When they want to, congress can sneak in small changes of law and pork projects into a bill, then claim not to notice it happening. All it takes is one person on a committee to get this inserted into a bill that's likely to pass, and it's done. At the same time, they claim their hands are tied to fix even simple problems. The tax code is over 15,000 pages long. There are hundreds of changes each year. Also, the Feds don't have to prosecute these cases. There's thousands of laws on the books that are violated openly and never prosecuted. In this particular case this "crime" lacks any criminal intent and represents no financial loss to the IRS, as they still get taxes paid to them. There's no victim, no damage, no loss of money. There has to be more important cases to prosecute that these. If they haven't changed it already, it's because they don't want to. They could have tacked this onto a hundred different bills and no one in Washington DC other than programmers and accountants would have noticed or cared. This is an easy fix, not something that needs it's own legislative event.
They really are completely delusional. What benefit does this provide to the consumers that they'll react positively to? Is there even any theoretical benefit to the consumer? Maybe the research was done entirely among Sony executives.
"It may be a trivial point in practice, but I think that one canidate with 100 million corporate dollars in his warchest is better off than a canidate with 10 million in his warchest and 90 million being spent by corporations on ads for him, which he doesn't actually control. The canidate who picks his own ads knows exactly what his strategy is and can coordinate ads to match it better than a semi-independant entity."
I don't think political favors work like that. Word would "get around" about exactly what kind of ad the poitician wanted. Considering the stakes, both sides need to know exactly what they're buying and selling - laws for millions.
Sadly, they'll probably end up with 75% of the cash they had before, but all of the advertising expenses of the campaign paid for, which is probably way more than 50% of the costs (Wild guess on my part, but TV ain't cheap.) This is how they get the cash out, they get to keep whatever is left at the end of the campaign.
You can stand on my neighbors property, and be less than 2 inches from my house. They still can't legally film inside my house with his permission.
I had an apartment in Chicago that was right up against the public sidewalk in front and right against the alley in back, you could easily be on public property and get as close as you want. Still illegal to film inside my house.
Another apartment, window to window distance to the adjacent buildings was about 4 inches. I could have probably set up a camera and lens to see through the holes between the fabric weave of my neighbor's curtains, but that doesn't mean it would be legal for me to do so on her bathroom window. The police should be subject to the same law.
Cameras are in common use. This doesn't give the cops the right to set one up to look inside your house through a pinhole in your curtains. If they attempt to look inside the house, in any way, with any technology that ever comes up, without a warrant this is a violation of your expectation of privacy and they should be locked up. Not disciplined, but subject to the exact same penalties as if I put a camera in the bathroom of a woman's house.
Now, that's what makes sense and should happen. In reality, with the fucked up judges in this country, they might arbitrarily rule that the cops can put a camera in your ass, and rule it illegal to crap it out.
"But did you learn something about computers? Chances you did learn something if you are now on Slashdot. The role of computers should be to provide a shiny toy for students to want to figure out how it works. To learn reading to play an RPG, to learn history to learn the backstory behind war games, etc."
Well, I learned about computers from Commodore and later Atari computers I had at home. The Apple 2 in school was a locked down box that you could do nothing on but play crappy edutainment (Am I the only one on Slashdot that thought Oregon Trail was just boring crap that didn't really teach anything?) The teacher would prevent you from doing anything that would result in you learning about how computers work. Did your teacher let you take them apart, try to write programs, or even give a basic explanation of the hardware? I had to wait until we got the Commodore to learn anything useful about computers.
"And how many kids who are have graduated still remember watching The Magic School Bus and Bill Nye the Science Guy? My guess is a lot of them."
And what has a generation of watching Bill Nye done to improve science education? It's worse than ever, the number of students pursuing science degrees has been declining. And actual understanding of science in the population is atrocious.
"Because that would be removing over half the class and relying on a book that is usually severely out of date?"
What are you teaching in elementary schools that's completely out of date? Math? Writing? Reading? Social Skills?
History is the only thing that arguably needs to be up to date, but that doesn't mean that you need to replace a 10 year old history book, it's still accurate from the Big Bang to 2000AD (or the last 6000 years, if you're and IDiot.) You can still learn a lot from a 50 year old history book.
The sad thing is that a lot of these technologies are pushed to teach kids computers, when most kids already know how to use one.