I disagree. A good calculator is an excellent learning tool. You can do your graphs manually and then check your work instantly. There's no better way to find out if you understand the concepts.
The sad fact is that most math classes are pointless exersizes in memorization and rote learning. There's lots of neat things you can do with a good understanding of statistics or geometry, for example, but by the time the teacher is done piling up things to memorize and abstract concepts there's no time to actually apply it all to anything useful or interesting.
I'm all for using calculators and PDAs in the classroom (in every class, in fact.) Anything that makes teachers stop pretending that memorizing forumlas is the same thing as teaching an understanding of the concepts is a good thing.
Capitalism suffers from exactly the same problem as communism: it works great in theory, because it assumes that people are basically good and honest and will cooperate with the spirit as well as the letter of the system.
You are very mistaken. Capitalism works precisely because it does _not_ assume that people are good and honest. Capitalism assumes that people will act out of self-interest, which is usually true.
If a broadband provider in your area is charging too much or blocking access to things people want, then it's only a matter of time before another alternative is developed to take its place. Someone else will see that there's an opportunity to make some money or spread some goodwill. Intelligent regulations don't make these corrections happen (they happen anyway) they just keep things moving a bit more smoothly.
The subject under discussion is specifically an example of what happens when capitalism is not allowed to correct the problem. The cable companies and other broadband providers got where they are because they were granted an artificial monopoly where competition was prohibited by the government. Some would claim that those were necessary incentives to encourage the huge investment needed to create the infrastructure needed, and that may have been true. But removing those antiquated regulations would change everything. Adding more won't change anything, at least not for the better.
Parents can threaten everything inside a school, no matter how good the intent or results.
... You are likely going to soon face some disgruntled parent who wants your gaming (with his/her tax dollars being used) to end. This person could be quiet about that, but likely the principle will get a phone call. And then if it doesn't end, the board of education will consider the matter. And they will kill it because by this point the initial parent got 100 other parents upset because the games being played are "evil and detrimental" to kid's development.
Good observation, wrong conclusion. What you've cited is really not an example of parental interaction; it's bad politics.
Parents are the ones who are supposed to be running the schools. It is their kids and their money we're talking about, after all. If parents are hypersensitive these days it's only because they're too often ignored and marginalized by their school systems.
You've just made a pretty good defense of a game night policy and anticipated some of the possible objections. Stand up and say these same things to the parents or to the hypothetical board of education in your example above. Listen to their concerns, offer a few compromises, and you might well convince them.
Re:We only learn from disaster
on
Cradle to Cradle
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The affects of environmental damage are incremental, so it will take an enlightened authority to force these changes on society.
There's no need to "force" changes on anyone, in fact that's probably the surest way to garner further resentment and skepticism toward your cause. In fact, I don't think you can find a single example of an authoritarian government with a good environmental track record. Russia's littered with toxic mistakes, China's building the world's largest dam project depite lots of protests, and the formerly communist and socialist countries of eastern Europe are only now recovering from the messes they made. Abuse and neglect are the inevitable result of granting that kind of power to anyone, no matter how "enlightened" they might allegedly be.
You simply can't force people to do anything really worthwhile, at least not for very long. Yes, businesses can be regulated, but the costs of each regulation have real-world impact that must also be weighed.
You have to use persuasion. The only enlighted authority that will make individuals change their behavior for the better is good old fashioned enlighted self-interest.
Supposedly they are required by the FCC to keep the leakage under a certain level. (I read it on the Internet, so it must be true.)
This is true. The state police and the fire department in my area were extremely annoyed a few years back by interference from a leaky cable. Under certain conditions it would flood their radio system with noise. The frequencies used for transmission within the cable overlap with frequencies allocated for other broadcast purposes. Cable TV companies are required to detect and repair signal leaks to avoid that kind of problem.
Here's a page from the FCC about this subject: http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/sig_leak.htm l
Interesting. Things seem to be done a bit different around here. Our cable lines are run on the same overhead utility poles as the power and telephone lines. Is the equivalent of the "pedestal" that box up on the pole? (No intention of stealing service or messing with stuff, just curious about the infrastructure.)
When doing the installation of cable to my home no traps were installed inside the house, unless I'm missing something obvious. In fact, to speed up the installation and make sure it would be run the way I needed I ran most of the in-house coax lines myself. The line comes off the pole, down into the garage, through a splitter in the crawspace, and then upstairs to the cable modem and televisions. The setup was pretty much the same at the last house I lived in. Seems to work ok.
Re:It's a new world, folks, adjust your arguments
on
Surveillance Update
·
· Score: 2
It's strange, but, here in the UK, over in Sri Lanka, and in a variety of other places around the world, we've been subjected to terrorism for decades without these authoritarian, mass surveillance measures being brought in.
Is this the same UK with 200,000 public surveillance cameras? Nope, no mass surveillance here! No siree!
What needs to happen is that every report that the lowliest field agent files regardless of classification needs to be submitted to an independent but small group of experts with both clearence and access to all this information. Obviously this is alot of information so I believe they need to set up some sort of small and secure network to file and review all this info.
Do you have any real concept of how much information you're talking about? You want a "small team" of experts to review "every report" from four major intelligence agencies, plus clandestine and subordinate agencies, millitary, and foreign sources? That's insane.
Streamlining communications and information sharing is, in part, what the new guidelines are intended to address. The problem is no so much lack of communication as too many levels of communication. Right now field officers can't initiate an investigation without first kicking it upstairs and waiting for the answer to trickle back down to them.
The FBI labors under all sorts of archaic and arbitrary restrictions on what they can investigate and when. The bad guys know all about those restrictions and take full advantage of them to foil investigations. This change in guidelines is not taking away our rights, destroying democracy, killing babies, etc. It's just removing some of those barriers and making the whole thing make more sense.
The Detroit News might be inclined to run this story because it's of particular interest to their audience, and that's perfectly appropriate. I bet Hollywood newspapers have a lot of news related to the movie industry, too.
Your implication that they're making it up is baseless. Thomas Gold has been saying this for years. If this is true then it lends some support to his theories.
interesting fact: The US gets more oil from Alberta than it gets from Saudi Arabia, yet watch the fascinating ass kissing the US plants on the asses of the Saudis. Very odd, and unjustifiable.
Well, that has very little to do with oil; it's political pragmatism. The Saudi gov't, as ineffectual and strange as it is, would almost certainly be replaced by something worse were it to be weakened economically or politically. So as long as it's in our best interests we might as well play nice; a power vaccum is a very dangerous thing in that part of the world.
Anyway, that is an interesting fact. And you're right about untapped reserves of useful hydrocarbons. I read an article yesterday, in fact, that suggested that previously depleted oil reserves may in fact be replenishing themselves from even deeper reserves. Interesting idea.
It seems to me that Red Hat (and other OSS companies) have basically two choices-- A) Patent your technologies so that others may not or B) Don't patent them and be forced to license them from those that do.
For the sake of argument let's say that's true (it isn't). That still doesn't answer the very valid objections in the original message. Patents are not weakened by non-enforcement. Red Hat could explicitly state that they will never, ever use their patents against any open-source developer. They have chosen not to do so. That would not in any way compromise their ability to defend themselves against other companies with bogus patents.
The whole patent system is FUBARed and needs to be fixed. Arging that it's essential to take out bad patents to defend yourself against bad patents is wrong and stupid. It only perpetuates the problem while doing nothing to encourage a real solution.
Notice that the Constitution does not say that illegal searches may be performed as long as any resulting evidence is not used against the persons being illegally searched. It says that it shall not happen.
The first issue, of course, is whether the searches in question were actually illegal. That in turn hinges on whether or not the searches are, in the words of the 4th, "unreasonable".
I'm not claiming that it's a good idea or that the gov't is necessarility justified in what they did, but the fact that you find it distasteful does not necessarily make it unconstitutional or illegal.
Yeah, I've wondered about that too. The indies apparently contribute absolutely nothing to the process. The record companies should just bypass the leeching indies and send their new music directly to the radio stations. If they don't like it, screw 'em.
Have you been in a US post office lately? Last one I went into was plastered with Windows XP posters, and there were even some demo disks at one point.
What does that have to do with anything? The US Post Office is financially self-supporting. They make money by entering into marketing deals, and MS is apparently one of the many companies they have deals with. Your tax dollars are not paying for Windows XP posters.
The fact that MS can lobby the pentagon (the *pentagon* for crissakes) speaks volumes about how much corporations run this country.
Nonsense. The Pentagon (and other parts of the military and civillian gov't) does business with thousands of private corporations. The alternative would be for the gov't to duplicate in every way what private industry already does just fine, and that wouldn't make a darn bit of sense, economically or philosophically.
Exactly. And the other source for the information is the NCIC database, which is maintained by he FBI and routinely used by all levels of law enforcement. It contains information on criminal convictions, stolen property, etc. It's used so that the police in different states all have access to the same basic information about various criminals and crimes. It is NOT the eeevil secret file on every citizen that some people seem to imagine.
Why these guys were collecting such information in the first place.
Because all of the information in question concerned criminal activity, and collecting information on criminal activity is what the FBI is for.
They did not have access to some giant dossier on every citizen like you seem to think. The only database even mentioned in the article is the one maintained National Crime Information Center (NCIC). The NCIC database contains nationwide information about criminal cases, including convictions, stolen property, missing persons, etc.
The NCIC is a reference which ensures that all levels of law enforcement have access to the same basic information. When you're stopped for a traffic violation the officer probably performs an NCIC check (and maybe one of the equivalent statewide system) to make sure that the car isn't stolen and that you're not wanted for some other crime. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and a surprising number of hardcore criminals get caught this way.
The other stuff the article mentioned were corporate crimes (or suspected crimes) which the FBI also knows about because they are, after all, criminal activities.
These corrupt agents were using legitimately collected information for illegitimate and illegal purposes. The bad thing is not the fact that the FBI has this information, but that it was used for personal gain and for blackmail. There are many good examples of government agencies and private corporations collecting information they shouldn't be collecting, but this is not such a case.
FBI had its panties in a twist because they might have to follow the law and release "suspects" they had nothing to charge them with after a week or two.
Or, perhaps, the FBI had it's panties in a twist because they were legally required to let legitimate suspects go free and disappear.
So let's see, it's wrong for the FBI to...
- Fail to detain suspects which intelligence suggests might have knowledge of future attacks
- Let suspects go free, because they might be involved in a future attack
- Detain suspects after an attack, because it's "tramping everybody's rights"
In addition, the BBC also has some merchandising and sells off programmes to foreign stations.
I think that's the loophole. The BBC sells their programs to overseas stations, which can afford them in part because they show commercials. In a way the creation of those programs is subsidized by commercial TV in other parts of the world.
...think US would have nukes if they haven't *stolen* German scientist and research?
Absolutely, considering that the US devised nukes during WWII and the Germans did not. Not that it matters.
If you mean rockets, then yeah, German scientists brought to the US after the war did give our technology a big boost, but even then it's a bit of a stretch to say that anyone "stole" the technology. (Except probably the Russians, and the Chinese.)
The examples you gave are more individualistic removal of enemies from within an area already under control of the perpetrator. The attack in Alderaan was a military attack using a 'weapon on mass destruction' on an enemy civilian target. Maybe a better comparison would be Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden.
Or the attacks on London by Germany.
But your argument is flawed. Alderaan was within the space controlled Empire and thus effectively was "under the control of the perpetrator". A town within a country, not the country next door.
Does he really want to go to college at age 30? By then he'll be far behind.
That's complete nonsense. Going back to college at age 60 might be hard, age 30 is nothing. The average 30 year old makes a much better student, too, since they're actually there to learn something, and not because mommy and daddy made them go.
If he goes to college directly out of high school he'll probably end up with a huge pile of loan debt that he'll have to pay off.
If he instead goes to work for a couple of years, saving and investing his money and taking classes part-time he will have the same degree with minimal debt, plus the accumulated job experience. Yes, it'll take longer to get a degree that way, but does that matter?
There is no REASON for a police officer to be there, especially since they probably wouldn't know what was going on anyway. They'd be hanging around waiting for someone familiar with the system to call up the requested information, and it would then be faxed on, just as if the police officer wasn't there.
The whole fax-a-warrant thing worries me. Suppose a malicious employee within the ISP just makes up some data, or falsifies existing records to implicate/protect someone? I assume that's a crime, but someone could go through hell proving that it happened.
Then again, I assume that this same process has been used with telephone call records and financial-type information for a while now, so maybe it's not as open to abuse as I imagine.
Agreed, except from what I understand (biologists back me up or shoot me down on this), mouths are a sterile environment.
I'm not a biologist, but I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. The mouth is a haven for all sorts of germs, which thrive in the warm, moist environment and live on the pletiful food residue.
Just for fun, here's a picture of what can happen if you get a bite wound and don't have it properly cleaned and treated:
Sorry I forgot the USA is the worlds saviour all bow down to the inherantly fair openminded country which never makes mistakes.
Huh? I don't know who you're arguing with, but it's not me. The US makes lots of mistakes, but do you really think the world would be a better place today if the US hadn't been around to oppose the Soviets?
The British don't have much to thank the US for? How about their continued existence? If the US had followed the isolationist path that many seem to prefer then the outcome of WWII would certainly not have been favorable for Britain or the rest of Europe.
Or do you really mean "what have you done for me lately?":) Aside from being staunch allies in virtually every aspect of world policy, of course.
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I disagree. A good calculator is an excellent learning tool. You can do your graphs manually and then check your work instantly. There's no better way to find out if you understand the concepts.
The sad fact is that most math classes are pointless exersizes in memorization and rote learning. There's lots of neat things you can do with a good understanding of statistics or geometry, for example, but by the time the teacher is done piling up things to memorize and abstract concepts there's no time to actually apply it all to anything useful or interesting.
I'm all for using calculators and PDAs in the classroom (in every class, in fact.) Anything that makes teachers stop pretending that memorizing forumlas is the same thing as teaching an understanding of the concepts is a good thing.
You are very mistaken. Capitalism works precisely because it does _not_ assume that people are good and honest. Capitalism assumes that people will act out of self-interest, which is usually true.
If a broadband provider in your area is charging too much or blocking access to things people want, then it's only a matter of time before another alternative is developed to take its place. Someone else will see that there's an opportunity to make some money or spread some goodwill. Intelligent regulations don't make these corrections happen (they happen anyway) they just keep things moving a bit more smoothly.
The subject under discussion is specifically an example of what happens when capitalism is not allowed to correct the problem. The cable companies and other broadband providers got where they are because they were granted an artificial monopoly where competition was prohibited by the government. Some would claim that those were necessary incentives to encourage the huge investment needed to create the infrastructure needed, and that may have been true. But removing those antiquated regulations would change everything. Adding more won't change anything, at least not for the better.
Good observation, wrong conclusion. What you've cited is really not an example of parental interaction; it's bad politics.
Parents are the ones who are supposed to be running the schools. It is their kids and their money we're talking about, after all. If parents are hypersensitive these days it's only because they're too often ignored and marginalized by their school systems.
You've just made a pretty good defense of a game night policy and anticipated some of the possible objections. Stand up and say these same things to the parents or to the hypothetical board of education in your example above. Listen to their concerns, offer a few compromises, and you might well convince them.
There's no need to "force" changes on anyone, in fact that's probably the surest way to garner further resentment and skepticism toward your cause. In fact, I don't think you can find a single example of an authoritarian government with a good environmental track record. Russia's littered with toxic mistakes, China's building the world's largest dam project depite lots of protests, and the formerly communist and socialist countries of eastern Europe are only now recovering from the messes they made. Abuse and neglect are the inevitable result of granting that kind of power to anyone, no matter how "enlightened" they might allegedly be.
You simply can't force people to do anything really worthwhile, at least not for very long. Yes, businesses can be regulated, but the costs of each regulation have real-world impact that must also be weighed.
You have to use persuasion. The only enlighted authority that will make individuals change their behavior for the better is good old fashioned enlighted self-interest.
This is true. The state police and the fire department in my area were extremely annoyed a few years back by interference from a leaky cable. Under certain conditions it would flood their radio system with noise. The frequencies used for transmission within the cable overlap with frequencies allocated for other broadcast purposes. Cable TV companies are required to detect and repair signal leaks to avoid that kind of problem.
Here's a page from the FCC about this subject:
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/sig_leak.ht
Interesting. Things seem to be done a bit different around here. Our cable lines are run on the same overhead utility poles as the power and telephone lines. Is the equivalent of the "pedestal" that box up on the pole? (No intention of stealing service or messing with stuff, just curious about the infrastructure.)
When doing the installation of cable to my home no traps were installed inside the house, unless I'm missing something obvious. In fact, to speed up the installation and make sure it would be run the way I needed I ran most of the in-house coax lines myself. The line comes off the pole, down into the garage, through a splitter in the crawspace, and then upstairs to the cable modem and televisions. The setup was pretty much the same at the last house I lived in. Seems to work ok.
Is this the same UK with 200,000 public surveillance cameras? Nope, no mass surveillance here! No siree!
Do you have any real concept of how much information you're talking about? You want a "small team" of experts to review "every report" from four major intelligence agencies, plus clandestine and subordinate agencies, millitary, and foreign sources? That's insane.
Streamlining communications and information sharing is, in part, what the new guidelines are intended to address. The problem is no so much lack of communication as too many levels of communication. Right now field officers can't initiate an investigation without first kicking it upstairs and waiting for the answer to trickle back down to them.
The FBI labors under all sorts of archaic and arbitrary restrictions on what they can investigate and when. The bad guys know all about those restrictions and take full advantage of them to foil investigations. This change in guidelines is not taking away our rights, destroying democracy, killing babies, etc. It's just removing some of those barriers and making the whole thing make more sense.
The Detroit News might be inclined to run this story because it's of particular interest to their audience, and that's perfectly appropriate. I bet Hollywood newspapers have a lot of news related to the movie industry, too.
Your implication that they're making it up is baseless. Thomas Gold has been saying this for years. If this is true then it lends some support to his theories.
Well, that has very little to do with oil; it's political pragmatism. The Saudi gov't, as ineffectual and strange as it is, would almost certainly be replaced by something worse were it to be weakened economically or politically. So as long as it's in our best interests we might as well play nice; a power vaccum is a very dangerous thing in that part of the world.
Anyway, that is an interesting fact. And you're right about untapped reserves of useful hydrocarbons. I read an article yesterday, in fact, that suggested that previously depleted oil reserves may in fact be replenishing themselves from even deeper reserves. Interesting idea.
For the sake of argument let's say that's true (it isn't). That still doesn't answer the very valid objections in the original message. Patents are not weakened by non-enforcement. Red Hat could explicitly state that they will never, ever use their patents against any open-source developer. They have chosen not to do so. That would not in any way compromise their ability to defend themselves against other companies with bogus patents.
The whole patent system is FUBARed and needs to be fixed. Arging that it's essential to take out bad patents to defend yourself against bad patents is wrong and stupid. It only perpetuates the problem while doing nothing to encourage a real solution.
The first issue, of course, is whether the searches in question were actually illegal. That in turn hinges on whether or not the searches are, in the words of the 4th, "unreasonable".
I'm not claiming that it's a good idea or that the gov't is necessarility justified in what they did, but the fact that you find it distasteful does not necessarily make it unconstitutional or illegal.
Yeah, I've wondered about that too. The indies apparently contribute absolutely nothing to the process. The record companies should just bypass the leeching indies and send their new music directly to the radio stations. If they don't like it, screw 'em.
What does that have to do with anything? The US Post Office is financially self-supporting. They make money by entering into marketing deals, and MS is apparently one of the many companies they have deals with. Your tax dollars are not paying for Windows XP posters.
Exactly. And the other source for the information is the NCIC database, which is maintained by he FBI and routinely used by all levels of law enforcement. It contains information on criminal convictions, stolen property, etc. It's used so that the police in different states all have access to the same basic information about various criminals and crimes. It is NOT the eeevil secret file on every citizen that some people seem to imagine.
Because all of the information in question concerned criminal activity, and collecting information on criminal activity is what the FBI is for.
They did not have access to some giant dossier on every citizen like you seem to think. The only database even mentioned in the article is the one maintained National Crime Information Center (NCIC). The NCIC database contains nationwide information about criminal cases, including convictions, stolen property, missing persons, etc.
The NCIC is a reference which ensures that all levels of law enforcement have access to the same basic information. When you're stopped for a traffic violation the officer probably performs an NCIC check (and maybe one of the equivalent statewide system) to make sure that the car isn't stolen and that you're not wanted for some other crime. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and a surprising number of hardcore criminals get caught this way.
The other stuff the article mentioned were corporate crimes (or suspected crimes) which the FBI also knows about because they are, after all, criminal activities.
These corrupt agents were using legitimately collected information for illegitimate and illegal purposes. The bad thing is not the fact that the FBI has this information, but that it was used for personal gain and for blackmail. There are many good examples of government agencies and private corporations collecting information they shouldn't be collecting, but this is not such a case.
Or, perhaps, the FBI had it's panties in a twist because they were legally required to let legitimate suspects go free and disappear.
So let's see, it's wrong for the FBI to...
- Fail to detain suspects which intelligence suggests might have knowledge of future attacks
- Let suspects go free, because they might be involved in a future attack
- Detain suspects after an attack, because it's "tramping everybody's rights"
I think that's the loophole. The BBC sells their programs to overseas stations, which can afford them in part because they show commercials. In a way the creation of those programs is subsidized by commercial TV in other parts of the world.
Absolutely, considering that the US devised nukes during WWII and the Germans did not. Not that it matters.
If you mean rockets, then yeah, German scientists brought to the US after the war did give our technology a big boost, but even then it's a bit of a stretch to say that anyone "stole" the technology. (Except probably the Russians, and the Chinese.)
Or the attacks on London by Germany.
But your argument is flawed. Alderaan was within the space controlled Empire and thus effectively was "under the control of the perpetrator". A town within a country, not the country next door.
That's complete nonsense. Going back to college at age 60 might be hard, age 30 is nothing. The average 30 year old makes a much better student, too, since they're actually there to learn something, and not because mommy and daddy made them go.
If he goes to college directly out of high school he'll probably end up with a huge pile of loan debt that he'll have to pay off.
If he instead goes to work for a couple of years, saving and investing his money and taking classes part-time he will have the same degree with minimal debt, plus the accumulated job experience. Yes, it'll take longer to get a degree that way, but does that matter?
The whole fax-a-warrant thing worries me. Suppose a malicious employee within the ISP just makes up some data, or falsifies existing records to implicate/protect someone? I assume that's a crime, but someone could go through hell proving that it happened.
Then again, I assume that this same process has been used with telephone call records and financial-type information for a while now, so maybe it's not as open to abuse as I imagine.
I'm not a biologist, but I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. The mouth is a haven for all sorts of germs, which thrive in the warm, moist environment and live on the pletiful food residue.
Just for fun, here's a picture of what can happen if you get a bite wound and don't have it properly cleaned and treated:
http://www.eatonhand.com/img/IMG00082.htm
Yeah, IR emitters are the standard way of handling interaction with cable boxes. My VCR and Tivo both use them.
Huh? I don't know who you're arguing with, but it's not me. The US makes lots of mistakes, but do you really think the world would be a better place today if the US hadn't been around to oppose the Soviets?
The British don't have much to thank the US for? How about their continued existence? If the US had followed the isolationist path that many seem to prefer then the outcome of WWII would certainly not have been favorable for Britain or the rest of Europe.
Or do you really mean "what have you done for me lately?"